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Summary

This report documents 12 cases of unlawful destruction of
civilian property by the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) in Gaza during Operation
Cast Lead from December 27, 2008 to January 18, 2009. These cases
describe instances in which Israeli forces caused extensive destruction of
homes, factories, farms and greenhouses in areas under IDF control without any
evident military purpose. These cases occurred when there was no fighting in
these areas; in many cases, the destruction was carried out during the final
days of the campaign when an Israeli withdrawal was imminent.

In the cases documented in this report, the IDF violated the
prohibition under international humanitarian law – the laws of war
– against deliberately destroying civilian property except where
necessary for lawful military reasons and the ensuing civilian harm is not
disproportionate. This report does not address civilian property damaged
or destroyed during immediate fighting; such destruction may or may not be
lawful, depending on the circumstances.

The available evidence indicates that the destruction in
each of the 12 cases documented in this report was carried out by the IDF for
either punitive or other unlawful reasons. Human Rights Watch found –
based on visits to each site, interviews with multiple witnesses, and the
examination of physical evidence – that there were no hostilities in the
area at the time the destruction occurred. In seven cases, satellite imagery of the area was available
during the fighting, and corroborated witness accounts that large numbers of
structures were destroyed shortly before Israel announced a ceasefire and
withdrew its forces from Gaza.

Two factors are especially relevant to the ongoing impact of
this destruction today, some 15 months after the conflict ended.

First, Israel's comprehensiveblockade of the Gaza Strip,
imposed since June 2007, has prevented reconstruction of private property and
public infrastructure after the conflict. The blockade continues to
affect the lives of the civilian population, including those whose losses are
documented in this report. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon noted in late March
2010 that Israel had allowed imports of cement for several repair projects,
including 151 housing units, but these imports were “a drop in a bucket”
compared to housing needs, and Israel continued to restrict or bar the entry of
many essential goods including materials needed for reconstruction. The
media and humanitarian agencies reported in March that many goods were entering
Gaza through smuggling tunnels beneath the southern border with Egypt, and many
damaged buildings had been at least partially repaired with bricks made from
smuggled cement and recycled concrete rubble. However, in the areas of
Gaza where the vast majority of homes were completely destroyed during the
conflict in December 2008 and January 2009 – including areas addressed in
this report – there has been virtually no reconstruction of destroyed
buildings, indicating that the cost of reconstruction materials under the
blockade remained prohibitive for Gaza’s residents, more than
three-quarters of whom live under the poverty line (as defined by international
standards). That poverty is often a product of or aggravated by the
blockade. Israeli officials insist that the blockade—which had
already degraded humanitarian conditions in Gaza before Operation Cast
Lead—will remain in place until Hamas releases Staff Sgt. Gilad Shalit, the Israeli
soldier captured in June 2006,
rejects violence, and fulfills other political conditions. The blockade,
which is supported by Egypt at Rafah's Gaza border, amounts to a form of
collective punishment of Gaza's 1.5 million civilians in violation of international
law.

Second, the inadequate steps that Israel has taken to
investigate alleged violations of the laws of war committed during Operation
Cast Lead and to bring to justice those found to be responsible compound the violations
documented in this report. As of March, Israeli military police had
opened 36 criminal investigations, which included interviewing Palestinian
witnesses, leading to the sentencing of one soldier who stole a credit card and
indictments of two others for endangering a child at a checkpoint. The
IDF has undertaken scores of military “operational debriefings” and
several broader inquiries, including one focused on the issue of property
destruction, but none took any testimony from Palestinian witnesses or victims.
The IDF disciplined four soldiers and commanders, one for destroying property,
but released only partial information about the circumstances. Notably,
Israel has not conducted thorough and impartial investigations into whether
policy decisions taken by senior political and military decision-makers
including pre-operation decisions led to violations of the laws of war, such as
the destruction of civilian infrastructure. (Human Rights Watch is not aware of
any meaningful steps by Hamas authorities to ensure accountability for serious
violations; a Hamas report released in January which purported to exonerate
Palestinian armed groups for laws-of-war violations lacked credibility.)

The laws of war prohibit attacks on civilian objects,
including houses and factories, unless they are a military objective. A
military objective is anything that provides enemy forces a definite military
advantage in the circumstances ruling at the time. Thus, even though a
residential home is presumed to be a civilian object, its use by enemy fighters
for deployment or to store weaponry or in the event it provides cover for
advancing enemy forces, will render it a military objective and subject to
attack or destruction. Even an unoccupied civilian structure can be a military
objective – such as a house blocking the line of fire to an enemy
position – and subject to lawful attack so long as its destruction cannot
reasonably be expected to cause harm disproportionate to the anticipated
military gain. Under the Fourth Geneva Convention, applicable during
occupations, the extensive destruction of property “carried out
unlawfully and wantonly” and not justified by military necessity, is a
grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, and can be prosecuted as a war crime.

This report examines incidents of destruction that suggest
violation of the laws-of-war prohibition of wanton destruction. This
report does not necessarily document all instances of unlawful property
destruction; our research was limited by practical constraints of time and
resources. Rather, Human Rights Watch examined cases of property
destruction that seemed particularly difficult to justify, such as when Israeli
forces were in control of an area, there was no active fighting there, and the
property was destroyed without any apparent lawful military
justification. We deliberately did not pursue cases in which the
destruction was not extensive, or the evidence suggested any possibility that
Israel’s destruction of the property in question could have been
militarily justified, based on mistaken information, or a consequence of
fighting in the immediate vicinity. Similarly, we did not
investigate Israeli conduct when the structures at issue may have been used by
Hamas to store ammunition or military equipment or to set booby-traps, or when
property was destroyed to permit the movement of Israeli forces because
adjoining roads were mined and impassable.

Because of the limited number of cases examined, we cannot
claim that the incidents examined in this report are representative of a
broader pattern, but instead address them because they are troubling in their
own right. Further inquiry is required to determine whether they were
part of a broader policy or practice.

Extensive, Unnecessary Destruction

Human Rights Watch documented the complete destruction of
189 buildings, including 11 factories, 8 warehouses and 170 residential
buildings, leaving at least 971 people homeless. The 12 incidents documented in
this report account for roughly five percent of the homes, factories and warehouses
destroyed in Gaza during the conflict. Overall, some 3,540 homes, 268
factories and warehouses, as well as schools, vehicles, water wells, public
infrastructure, greenhouses and large swathes of agricultural land, were
destroyed, and 2,870 houses were severely damaged. Our conclusions about
the unlawfulness of the destruction of property are limited to the incidents we
investigated in depth. Israel should thoroughly investigate these cases –
including the lawfulness or unlawfulness of any relevant policy decisions
– and punish persons found responsible.

Residents of neighborhoods we investigated fled or were
ordered to leave their homes by Israeli troops, and returned after the
war’s end to find their previously undamaged or moderately damaged homes
destroyed and their vehicles demolished. In these cases, all evidence points to
the destruction being carried out by Israeli forces. In the cases we examined
in the neighborhoods of Izbt Abd Rabbo, Zeitoun, and Khoza’a, virtually
every home, factory and orchard had been destroyed within certain areas,
apparently indicating that a plan of systematic destruction was carried out in
these locations.

The destroyed industrial establishments that Human Rights
Watch investigated include a flour mill, juice and biscuit plants, and seven
concrete factories. At all the concrete factories that we examined, tanks
or military bulldozers destroyed or badly damaged every cement-mixing truck,
cement pump truck and other vehicles on the property. As noted, during Operation
Cast Lead, Israel could have lawfully attacked otherwise civilian objects
if they were making an effective contribution to Palestinian armed
groups’ military action and their destruction offered a definite military
advantage at the time. For example, if armed groups had commandeered
concrete factories during the fighting and were using the concrete produced to
build or repair military objects like bunkers, such factories could have been
legitimate targets for Israeli attacks. However, Gaza’s concrete factories
were unable to operate at all prior to and during the war because they had run
out of cement, which they must import due to their lack of capacity to produce
it. There is no evidence that any of the cement and concrete factories in
Gaza contributed to the military efforts of Palestinian armed groups during the
fighting.

Satellite imagery taken at intervals during the conflict
shows that in several neighborhoods Israeli forces destroyed property in areas
where they had established control and immediately prior to their withdrawal
from Gaza on January 18. In Izbt Abd Rabbo, satellite imagery shows that
only 11 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged between December 27, 2008
and January 6, 2009, but that 330 buildings were destroyed or severely damaged
from January 6 to 19 – a thirty-fold increase in destruction that
occurred after the IDF had apparently established control of the area. In
the Zeitoun neighborhood, satellite imagery shows that 43 percent of the
destruction of buildings and greenhouses occurred during the last two days of
the war, while only three percent of the destruction occurred during the
preceding six days. This evidence is consistent with witness accounts that
large-scale destruction occurred after the IDF had already established control
of the area and there was no ongoing fighting.

An internal IDF investigation completed in April 2009 (which
did not examine individual incidents of destruction or consider testimony from
Palestinian witnesses) “confirmed that although relatively extensive
damage was caused to private property” in Gaza, the IDF’s
destruction of civilian property was lawful because Hamas used civilian
infrastructure for military purposes by deploying fighters, weapons,
booby-traps, and digging tunnels in houses, factories and mosques. The Israeli
Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in July 2009 that “IDF forces demolished structures
that threatened their troops and had to be removed,” including (1)
houses used by Hamas for military purposes during the fighting; (2) other structures
“used by Hamas operatives
for terrorist activity”; (3) structures whose total or partial
destruction was imperatively required by military necessity, such as the
movement of IDF forces; (4) “agricultural
elements” used as cover for Hamas tunnels and infrastructure; and (5)
buildings next to the security fence between Gaza and Israel that Hamas used
for operations against IDF forces or for digging tunnels into Israeli
territory.

Incidents of property destruction that fell into these
categories would constitute lawful attacks on military targets. However,
these categories do not account for any of the incidents of large-scale
destruction of civilian property documented in this report. The Israeli
government has published the results of a military probe into one case
documented in this report, which found an attack on a flour mill to be
lawful. The probe’s conclusions, however, are contradicted by
available video and other evidence. (IDF lawyers told Human Rights Watch
that the case could be reopened if new evidence was presented. In late
March, Israel announced that it had approved cement imports to repair the flour
mill.) The IDF has not provided explanations for the other 11 incidents
that Human Rights Watch documented. Israel should conduct thorough and
impartial investigations into these incidents and determine whether the
incidents were lawful and, if not, if they reflected official policy.

During the IDF offensive in Gaza, Hamas and other
Palestinian armed groups used civilian structures to engage Israeli forces and
to store arms, according to news reports, video and photographic
evidence. They also booby-trapped and dug tunnels under civilian
structures. Human Rights Watch documented that armed groups fired rockets
from populated areas; property damage caused by counter-strikes against the
attacking forces could have amounted to lawful “collateral damage” (see Legal Obligations).
Armed groups may also have been responsible for damage to civilian property in
cases in which IDF attacks triggered secondary explosions of weapons or
explosives, stored by armed groups, which damaged nearby structures. The
IDF has published video footage that appears to show several such
incidents.

However, in the 12 incidents examined in this report,
extensive investigations revealed no apparent lawful military justifications
for the destruction. The IDF was not engaging Palestinian forces at the
time they destroyed the property – fighting had stopped – and in
most cases the destruction of the property occurred after the IDF had
eliminated or dispersed Palestinian fighters in the area and consolidated its
control, such as by occupying houses, stationing tanks in streets or on nearby
hills, and undertaking continuous surveillance from manned and unmanned
aircraft. The possible future military use by armed groups of some
civilian structures in these areas – such as to set booby-traps, store
weapons, or build tunnels– cannot justify the wide-scale and at times
systematic destruction of whole neighborhoods, as well as of factories and
greenhouses that provided food and other items essential for the well-being of
the civilian population.

For example, in Izbt Abd Rabbo, Human Rights Watch
documented the complete destruction of 45 residential structures, which had
housed at least 287 people, on or near the neighborhood’s main road
during Operation Cast Lead. (Satellite imagery shows that a total of 341
buildings were destroyed in the area.) Fifteen industrial establishments
in the area east of the neighborhood were also destroyed. According to
separate individual interviews with 17 residents, including residents who were
ordered to leave their homes by IDF soldiers or whom the IDF used as
“human shields,” the vast majority of the destruction that this
report documents in Izbt Abd Rabbo took place after January 7, by which point
the IDF exercised control over the neighborhood.

In cases that Human Rights Watch examined in agricultural
areas of Zeytoun, south of Gaza City – which represent a fraction of the
total destruction in the area – residents said that at least 193 people
had lived in residential buildings that were destroyed during the war.
The accounts of residents suggest that Israeli forces inflicted extensive
damage to buildings and land there in the early days of the ground offensive,
but that they did not destroy most houses in these areas until after January 7,
when they had already occupied these areas and almost all residents had
fled. Many of the Zeytoun residents with whom Human Rights Watch spoke
said that they left these areas after their homes had been shelled or hit with
small-arms fire or they were ordered to leave by IDF soldiers. When they
returned to the areas after the war, they said, they found the buildings had
been bulldozed or destroyed with anti-tank mines. Human Rights Watch also
observed bulldozer tracks in destroyed agricultural areas. In each
incident we investigated, including where destruction occurred after residents
and witnesses had left the area, Human Rights Watch cross-checked available reports to determine
whether Palestinian armed groups counter attacked the area after the IDF gained control over
it. In some cases, Israeli forces engaged and killed Palestinian fighters
in areas where destruction occurred after residents and witnesses had left, but
there is no evidence that the fighting caused or could in any way account for
the extensive destruction of property we documented.

Public statements by some Israeli politicians suggest a willingness to conduct attacks
against civilian infrastructure in Gaza to deter rocket attacks against Israel
by armed groups. For example, Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai said at a
conference on February 2, 2009 that “we have to determine a price tag for every rocket fired into
Israel,” and recommended that “even if they fire at an open area or
into the sea, we must damage their infrastructures and destroy 100 houses.”
Because these statements both appeared consistent with some attacks during
Operation Cast Lead and might be applied to Israel’s strategy in future
conflicts, the Israeli government should publicly repudiate punitive attacks against civilian
infrastructure.

Human Rights Watch documented that Palestinian armed groups
in Gaza launched thousands of rocket attacks against Israeli population over
the years in violation of the laws of war. During “Operation Cast
Lead,” approximately 800,000 Israelis were within range of hundreds of
rocket attacks, which killed three Israeli civilians and seriously injured
several dozen others. Individuals who willfully conducted or ordered deliberate or
indiscriminate rocket attacks on civilians are responsible for war
crimes. However, laws of war violations by one party to a conflict do not
justify violations by another party. The fundamental principle of
distinction under the laws of war requires armed forces to
distinguish between civilians and military objectives, and only target the
latter, regardless of the conduct of the other side.

Inadequacy of Investigations

Israel is obliged under international law to investigate
allegations of serious violations of the laws of war, including alleged
excessive destruction of civilian property, and to prosecute those found
responsible. To date, although Israel has conducted numerous “operational
debriefings” and three dozen criminal investigations, it has not met that
obligation.

The only reported penalty imposed for unlawful property
destruction during “Operation Cast Lead” was an unknown
disciplinary measure taken against one soldier. (The IDF has disciplined
four soldiers and commanders for actions during “Operation Cast
Lead,” but has published only limited information on the circumstances.)
IDF lawyers told Human Rights Watch at a meeting in February 2010 that
the incident involved “uprooting
vegetation” in Gaza and that a disciplinary sanction was imposed
immediately by the commander in the field, but they had given no details of the
incident or the disciplinary measure.

Overall, it is unclear how many and
which incidents the IDF has examined related to the unlawful destruction of
property. The Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs stated in a report
published in January 2010 that the IDF had opened 150 individual inquiries into
alleged wrongdoing by Israeli soldiers during Operation Cast Lead, including 36
criminal investigations by military police. According to the report, none of
the 36 criminal investigations involved property destruction or examinations of
orders or strategies regarding property destruction. (The report said the
incidents involved alleged shooting of civilians, using civilians as human
shields, mistreatment of detainees and civilians, and pillage and theft.) The
military police opened investigations into two incidents that apparently
included property destruction as well as another offense; an Israeli government
report published in July 2009 stated
that military police had opened one investigation into “allegations regarding damage to
property and pillage,” and another investigation into a case where a home
was destroyed after an Israeli soldier allegedly shot four members of the
family, killing two.

Lawyers with the IDF’s Military Advocate
General’s office told Human Rights Watch in February 2010 that many of
the cases of property destruction that Human Rights Watch documented are being
probed either by “operational debriefings” or by
“command investigations” – two kinds of probes that
may differ in several respects, but are both conducted by IDF officers rather
than by trained military police investigators and do not involve contacting
Palestinian witnesses. The officers could not provide further
information. The cases being probed, according to the IDF lawyers, include the
destruction of the Abu Jubbah cement
factory, the Wadiyya Food
Factory, and areas of the neighborhoods of Khoza’a, Zeytoun and Abd
Rabbo. An inquiry into damage to the El Badr Flour Mill has ended, and
concluded there was no wrongdoing by the IDF. With the exception of the
flour mill case, which according to an Israeli report the IDF learned about on
September 15, 2009 with the publication of the report of the UN Fact Finding
Mission on the Gaza Conflict, it is not clear when the IDF initiated these
inquiries. Human Rights Watch wrote to the IDF detailing all the
incidents in the present report on August 21, 2009 (see Annex A) and received a
response on September 8, 2009 (see Annex B).

In addition to the probes the IDF has opened into these
individual incidents, the IDF also examined the destruction of civilian
structures in one of five broad “command investigations” into
issues from the Gaza operation. The relevant
IDF command investigation, conducted by a colonel, focused on “issues
relating to the infrastructure operations and the demolishing of structures by
the IDF forces during the ground operations phase of Operation Cast Lead.”

According to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the relevant
IDF command investigation examined:

a. Orders and instructions given and
determined by different command levels (from the headquarters to the ground
forces, before and during the operation), regarding the destruction of
buildings and infrastructure. b. Extent of destruction of buildings and
infrastructure in the different areas, divided in accordance to: stages of the
operation, operating units, types of buildings or infrastructure that were
damaged, purposes of destruction, the manner in which the destruction was
carried out (via engineers/method of destruction/verification of evacuation of
residents) and whether the destruction was planned or spontaneous by decisions
which were taken in the field in ‘real time’. c. Intelligence and
operational information regarding the nature of the enemy’s offensive and
defensive methods, and with regard to infrastructure of the enemy that was
identified and documented by our forces, which support the operational
necessity of destruction.

Israel has provided no specific information on how the
investigation was conducted. A report published by the Ministry of
Foreign Affairs in January 2010 stated that “the investigation did not deal with specific incidents
alleged in complaints or reports.”

According to the January 2010 report, Israel launched an
additional 10 inquiries into
incidents of property damage after becoming aware of them with the publication
of the report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict on September
15, 2009. The January 2010 report described the conclusions of probes
into four cases of property damage discussed by the Fact Finding Mission; in
none of these cases did the IDF find itself liable for laws of war
violations. Human Rights Watch documented one of these incidents: the
attack on the el-Bader flour mill, which is discussed below. A list of the
other six incidents being examined has not been made public.

In January, Israel reportedly agreed to pay the UN US$10.5
million for the damage it caused to UN facilities during the war. A UN
Headquarters Board of Inquiry led by Ian Martin investigated nine attacks that
damaged UN facilities or killed or injured UN personnel, finding Israel
responsible in seven cases and Palestinian armed groups in one case; the
responsible party for the remaining attack could not be determined. Israel
stated that the payment did not amount to an admission of wrongdoing.

Reconstruction Denied

Post-war reconstruction in Gaza has been greatly hampered by
Israel’s continuing blockade (supported by Egypt) of the territory.
Israel controls the Gaza Strip’s land, air, and sea access with the
exception of a 15-kilometer border with Egypt. Israel’s strict
blockade of Gaza has remained in place following the end of major military
operations, exacerbating the effects of the wartime destruction. Since the end
of the conflict, Israel has granted approval to a limited number of shipments
of construction materials designated for specific projects. Israel
allowed in only six truckloads of construction materials from January to May
2009, according to the United Nations, which noted that “the parallel figure during the
same period of 2007, before the Hamas takeover of Gaza, was over 39,000
truckloads.” In June 2009, Israel allowed entry to 18
truckloads of cement and gravel (to expand the Palestinian side of the Kerem
Shalom border crossing). In a significant positive development, Israel
allowed the shipment of 100 truckloads of glass from December 2009 to February
2010, and reportedly approved a second shipment of window glass beginning on
March 2, 2010, to be sold commercially. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon
informed the UN Security Council on March 24 that Israel had approved cement
shipments to construct 151 housing units in Khan Younis, and to repair a number
of structures damaged during “Operation Cast Lead,” including the
Badr Flour Mill discussed in this report. However, Israel continues to deny
entry to cement, iron bars, and other construction
materials, on the grounds that Hamas could divert them for military
purposes.

Israel may inspect goods entering and leaving Gaza, but
restrictions should be for specific security reasons and should not be used to
block basic goods and civilian necessities.

While Israel has consistently failed to provide specific
security justifications for its refusal to allow many basic goods into Gaza,
there are valid Israeli security concerns that Hamas could use cement to build
strengthened military bunkers and tunnels. However, according to
humanitarian aid organizations, Israel has refused to seriously discuss
creating a mechanism that would allow the delivery of much-needed construction
materials for civilian reconstruction projects in Gaza by ensuring the
independent monitoring of the end-use of the materials. According to a
March 2010 report prepared by a UK parliamentary delegation after a visit to
Gaza, the “UN stresses that every single tile, pipe or bag of cement is
tracked from the border crossing to its final use,” and noted that the UN
had offered to allow Israel to install permanent remote visual monitoring of their housing projects,
“in order to verify that all building materials were being used for their
stated purposes.” Israel should seek to create a mechanism for the
delivery of needed construction materials that would address these concerns as
well as the severe impact of import prohibitions on thousands of civilians who
remain displaced by the destruction of their homes. By denying entry to
materials necessary for reconstruction, Israel is prolonging the post-war
hardship of the civilian population.

Some reconstruction materials are reportedly among the goods
smuggled into Gaza from Egypt via underground tunnels but are too limited in
quantity and expensive to enable large-scale reconstruction. In March 2010, the price of
smuggled concrete had reportedly fallen to 900 Israeli shekels (US $240)
per ton from 4000 shekels (US $1080) per ton immediately after the conflict,
but the price of smuggled metal
reinforcing bars, which are also necessary for the type of home
construction common in Gaza, remained high at 2000 (US $540) Israeli shekels
per ton. Such prices evidently remain out of reach for persons whose
homes were completely destroyed. According to the UN, approximately 80 percent
of Gaza’s population is impoverished and dependent on food aid. Human rights and humanitarian workers in Gaza
told Human Rights Watch that as of late March 2010, many local factories were
producing concrete cinderblocks (or breeze blocks) by grinding down the rubble of destroyed
buildings and mixing it with cement smuggled through the tunnels from Egypt,
and that many of the partially destroyed buildings in Gaza’s cities and
refugee camps had been at least partly rehabilitated with this material.
However, they noted that there has been virtually no reconstruction in outlying
areas where large numbers of buildings were completely destroyed, including the
areas documented in this report.

As a result of the war and the ban on supply of
reconstruction materials, thousands of Gazan families remain homeless. As of November
2009 – ten months after the war ended – the UN reported that more
than 20,000 people still remain displaced, with children being among the worst
affected. The more fortunate displaced are living with relatives or
renting apartments; the less lucky still live in makeshift shelters inside their damaged homes. As of
November, 120 families, including 500 children, were still living in tent camps
set up as temporary shelters ten months previously, according to international
humanitarian agencies.

The UN also remains unable to implement reconstruction
plans. The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees (UNRWA) reported in August that
the blockade was preventing it from conducting an estimated US $43 million
worth of needed repairs, including
to 2,200 destroyed UNRWA-provided houses, as well as schools, sanitation
facilities, warehouses, and other installations damaged during the war.
UNRWA announced in December 2009 that it would resort to “compressed earth blocks”
to build 122 planned homes for the displaced. (In addition, UNRWA began
construction on several new housing projects with a total of 2,400 housing
units prior to the siege in 2007, but has been unable to complete them due to
the ban on construction materials.)

Many of the industrial
establishments that Israeli forces destroyed had not been operating before
the war for lack of supplies due to the blockade, but the destruction of these
factories’ physical plant makes the rejuvenation of Gaza’s
economy an even more remote prospect.

As with armed conflicts elsewhere, Human Rights Watch takes
no position on the decision of either side in the recent Gaza conflict to
resort to military force, whether to defend itself or to pursue other goals,
but instead focuses on how the warring parties use military force, namely, whether
they comply with the requirements of international humanitarian law. Just
as Hamas should hold its serious abusers accountable, so Israel should hold
accountable those responsible for serious laws of war violations, including
those related to property destruction. Like Hamas, Israel should
cooperate with international accountability mechanisms. And just as Hamas
should immediately stop all rocket attacks on Israeli civilian areas emanating
from Gaza, so Israel should urgently open Gaza’s borders to reconstruction
materials and other essential supplies. The United States, the European
Union and other allied states should
urge both Israel and Hamas to abide by its legal obligations in these regards.

On September 15, 2009, the United Nations Fact Finding
Mission on the Gaza Conflict, led by Justice Richard Goldstone, published a
report that found evidence that both Israel and Hamas had committed war crimes
and possible crimes against humanity. The report documented cases where
Israeli forces allegedly engaged in “extensive destruction of property, not justified by military
necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly,” and called on
both sides to carry out credible investigations within six months. The
United Nations Human Rights Council and General Assembly endorsed the
report. On February 5, 2009 the UN Secretary-General reported to the
General Assembly on steps taken by the Israeli and Palestinian authorities to
investigate violations, as called for in General Assembly resolution A/RES/64/10,
but concluded that investigations were ongoing and that “no determination
can be made on the implementation of the [General Assembly] resolution by the
parties concerned.” On February 26, the General Assembly approved
resolution A/RES/64/254, reiterating its call for Israel and the Palestinian
side to conduct credible investigations and requesting the Secretary-General to
report on steps taken by both sides within five months, “with a
view to the consideration of further action, if necessary, by the relevant
United Nations organs and bodies, including the Security Council.”

The United States and the European Union are the
international actors with the greatest leverage to press Israel to uphold its
obligations under the laws of war. The United States supplied
approximately $2.77 billion in military aid to Israel in 2009. Following
the Gaza war, the European Union, Israel’s largest foreign trading
partner, unofficially froze any upgrade in its relations with Israel, which are
governed by an Association Agreement.

The investigation results, approved by IDF Chief of Staff
Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi and published in April 2009, concluded: “In all of the areas in which the IDF
operated, the level of damage to the infrastructure was proportional, and did
not deviate from that which was required to fulfill the operational
requirements.” The investigation blamed “the extent of
damage caused to buildings” on “the extensive use by Hamas of those same buildings for
terrorist purposes and targeting IDF forces.” The investigation noted
that the IDF’s “written plans for the
operation” did not sufficiently stress the need to minimize the
damage to civilian property, but claimed that nonetheless, “the forces in the field understood”
these limitations. Reports published by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs
in July 2009 and January 2010 reiterated these conclusions.

Recommendations

To the Government of Israel

Conduct
thorough and impartial investigations into alleged violations of
international humanitarian law during the fighting of December
2008-January 2009 in Gaza. Make the investigation findings public
and prosecute those responsible for war crimes in trials respecting
international standards. Immediately lift the blockade of Gaza and
facilitate the free flow of humanitarian aid and commercial goods,
including materials urgently required for the reconstruction of destroyed
civilian property, such as concrete and metal rods.

Provide prompt and adequate compensation to the victims of
laws-of-war violations in Gaza.

Implement the findings and recommendations of the final
report produced by the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza
Conflict.

Review policy and tactical decisions made during Operation
Cast Lead that may have led to unnecessary destruction of civilian
property, with public findings and recommendations for minimizing such
destruction in any future engagements.

To the Government of the United States

Suspend shipment to Israel under the Foreign
Military Sales Program of Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers, pending the conclusion of an
official investigation into the IDF’s use of these bulldozers to
destroy civilian property in Gaza in violation of the laws of war.

Use the leverage that comes from the massive US military
assistance to Israel to press Israel to :

conduct a thorough, independent and impartial
investigation into unjustified destruction of civilian infrastructure in
the Gaza Strip during Operation Cast Lead, and compensate those
unlawfully harmed; and

open Gaza’s borders to allow for the entry of
humanitarian aid and commercial goods needed for rebuilding.

To the European Union

Under the leverage provided by the terms of the
Association Agreement with Israel, the EU should press Israel to :

conduct a thorough, independent and impartial
investigation into alleged violations of the laws of war in the Gaza
Strip during Operation Cast Lead, and compensate those unlawfully harmed;
and

open Gaza’s borders to allow for the entry of
humanitarian aid and commercial goods needed for rebuilding.

To the United Nations
Human Rights Council

Review implementation of the Goldstone report by the
parties to the conflict and UN bodies in future sessions of the Human
Rights Council.

To the UN General Assembly

Consider the UN
Secretary-General’s report in response to General Assembly Res
A/64/L.48, due by July 26, 2010, and, in case of continued failure
by the parties to conduct impartial investigations and prosecute those
responsible for serious laws-of-war violations, refer the situation to the
Security Council.

To the UN Secretary-General

Monitor and report to the
General Assembly within five months (by July 26, 2010) on investigations
conducted by the parties to the conflict as required by UN General Assembly
resolution A/64/L.48, including an assessment of whether the steps taken meet
international standards of promptness, thoroughness and impartiality.

Should Israel and Hamas’s
investigations continue to fall short of international standards for
thoroughness and impartiality, refer the report of the UN Fact
Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict to the UN Security Council under article
99 of the UN Charter.

To the UN Security Council

As it has done in response to other conflicts, call on the
parties to the Gaza conflict to conduct thorough and impartial
investigations into the allegations of laws-of-war violations by their
respective forces, prosecute those responsible for serious violations, and
compensate the victims.

Await next steps by the UN General Assembly and in case of
continued failure by the parties to conduct impartial investigations and
prosecute those responsible for serious laws-of-war violations the
Security Council should create its own independent committee of
experts to monitor and report on progress made by the parties to conduct
thorough and impartial investigations into alleged laws-of-war violations.

If the parties continue to fail to conduct thorough and
impartial investigations up to international standards refer the conflict
to the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court.

Methodology

Human Rights Watch conducted research for this report in
Gaza from April 8 to 19, 2009. A researcher entered Gaza via Egypt after
Israeli authorities denied or failed to respond to six Human Rights Watch
requests to ­­enter Gaza via the Israeli crossing at Erez. The
researcher conducted the research together with a Human Rights Watch consultant
based in Gaza.

This report documents 12 incidents in which Israeli forces
extensively destroyed or damaged civilian property in apparent violation of the
laws of war. These incidents are drawn from four different geographical
areas of Gaza – western Beit Lahiya in the northwest, Izbt Abd Rabbo in
the northeast, Zeytoun in the north / central part, and Khoza’a in the
southeast. We selected these cases by surveying the damage in Gaza, reviewing
reports by the United Nations and humanitarian organizations, and considering
accounts by the media and human rights groups.

Because the laws-of-war violation of wanton destruction certainly occurs in cases in which
one party to a conflict destroys property extensively in an area over which it has
effective control without a lawful military purpose, we focused our research on
such relatively clear alleged incidents. In cases where initial
information or further investigations raised the likelihood that the
destruction of property was justified, we did not investigate further.

The laws of war provide that the determination of whether an
incident of property destruction was lawful or unlawful must be based on
whether it was reasonable for the responsible force to conclude – based
on what was known or should have been known at the time rather than in
hindsight – that the property was a valid military objective in the
circumstances prevailing at the time, and that its destruction would not be
expected to cause disproportionate civilian loss compared to the anticipated
military gain. In each of the cases we document, the scale of the
destruction strongly discounts the possibility that the property was destroyed
reasonably, accidentally or based on the mistaken assumption it was serving a contemporaneous military purpose.

As noted, this report deliberately excludes cases where
there was a lawful military necessary reason to justify the destruction of
civilian property. We did not investigate cases including several reported instances where large-scale
destruction was caused by aerial bombings, because of the presumed
difficulty in determining whether or not individual aerial bombings of civilian
structures were carried out with criminal intent or as part of a widespread
attack. In three cases in which Human Rights Watch conducted preliminary
research, it either appeared possible or we could not rule out that Israeli
forces might have destroyed or damaged property out of military necessity or
due to mistaken targeting or intelligence, and we therefore did not pursue
those investigations any further or include them in this report; a fourth such
case is mentioned in a footnote.

During the course of field research, Human Rights Watch
conducted interviews with 94 residents in Gaza – the majority of whom had
left their areas of residence before these were destroyed -- primarily in
Arabic with an interpreter, as well as with a UN expert on unexploded ordnance
in Gaza. These interviews were conducted individually and privately,
unless otherwise noted. In addition, we conducted extensive on-site
investigations, examining destroyed structures and the surrounding areas for
signs of military activity and armed exchanges between Israeli and Palestinian
forces. Human Rights Watch examined forensic evidence at the scenes, such
as the remnants of anti-tank mines used as demolition explosives and debris
from aerial bombardment, artillery fire, tank fire, and small arms fire, as
well as tank and bulldozer tread marks. Lastly, Human Rights Watch
examined satellite images provided by the United Nations Operational Satellite
Applications Programme (UNOSAT), some of which are
presented in the report. The images show physical destruction throughout
Gaza at different phases of the campaign.

Human Rights Watch does not dispute that in some cases,
damage to civilian structures was caused by explosions from booby-traps or secondary
explosions due to weapons placed by Palestinian armed groups. However, no
reports, media accounts or our own research indicated that explosive booby-traps
planted by Palestinian armed groups or secondary explosions caused by weapons
stored by these armed groups were responsible for any significant amount of the
damage seen in Gaza. (In response to specific questions from Human Rights
Watch, the IDF has not provided evidence or claimed that the 12 cases of
large-scale destruction documented in this report were caused by Palestinian
armed groups.)

On August 21, 2009, Human Rights Watch sent the IDF detailed
questions about its policies on property destruction and the incidents
documented in this report (see Appendix 1). In its response of September 8,
2009, the IDF referred Human Rights Watch to reports already published by the
IDF and Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs (see Appendix 2). On November
23, 2009, Human Rights Watch requested a meeting with the IDF to discuss
accountability measures taken with regard to alleged violations during
“Operation Cast Lead,” including the incidents documented in this
report. Members of the IDF Military Advocate General’s office and the
Spokesperson’s office met with us on February 4, 2010. This report
takes these meetings and Israeli documents as well as other official Israeli
statements into account, citing them where relevant. It also cites the
statements of Israeli soldiers who fought in Operations Cast Lead, as published
by Breaking the Silence, an Israeli nongovernmental organization of IDF
veterans.

Destruction of Property during the Conflict

On December 27, 2008, Israel launched what it called Operation
Cast Lead. The stated aim of the military operation was to stop the
ongoing rocket fire into Israel from Palestinian armed groups in Gaza.
After a large-scale air campaign, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) on January 3,
2009 launched a major ground offensive. Israeli troops began to withdraw from
Gaza early on January 18. The IDF operations killed some 1,387 Palestinians, at
least 762 of whom were civilians, according to a list of names published by the
Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem.[1]
Thirteen Israelis died during the fighting, three of them civilians.[2]

Beyond the loss of human life, the war in Gaza resulted in
the destruction of thousands of private homes, as well as public
infrastructure, factories, businesses and workshops, vehicles, and agricultural
land and animals. The sheer extent of the destruction does not, in
itself, indicate violations of international humanitarian law (the laws of
war). However, Human Rights Watch’s investigation into 12 incidents
found that in these specific cases the IDF destroyed extensive civilian
property in apparent violation of the laws of war. We do not claim that
these violations are typical of the destruction in Gaza generally – the
lawfulness or unlawfulness of which must still be assessed. In conducting
that investigation, Israel should examine whether any violations were due
to policies adopted by the military or the government. Property may be
destroyed only for imperative
reasons of military necessity and in accordance with the rules of proportionality.

According to a joint survey by UN agencies, the fighting
destroyed 3,540 housing units in Gaza and 2,870 sustained severe damage during
Operation Cast Lead.[3]
Fighting and destruction during the war caused displacement of more than 50,000
people.[4]
As of March 2010, humanitarian workers in Gaza informed Human Rights Watch that
several factories in Gaza were operating to produce concrete cinderblocks (or
breeze blocks) by combining the pulverized rubble of destroyed buildings with
cement smuggled through the tunnels from Egypt, and that some reconstruction of
damaged homes using this material was underway in refugee camps and cities in
Gaza.[5]
However, these sources reported that the vast majority of destroyed
homes, particularly in areas of Gaza that saw extensive destruction during the
war like Izbt Abd Rabbo, have not been rebuilt or repaired. While the
price of cement and metal bars smuggled
into Gaza via tunnels had dropped to 900 Israeli shekels (US $240) and 2000
shekels (US $540) per ton, respectively, by March, these prices appeared to
remain out of reach for the majority of Gazans whose homes were totally
destroyed.[6]
As of November, ten months after the war, at least 20,000 people remained
displaced, in large part due to Israel’s ban on importing into Gaza
construction material such as cement, needed to rebuild housing.[7]
(According to a January 18, 2009 statement by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs,
Israel permits “humanitarian aid” to enter Gaza, but “cement,
sand, gravel and steel are not considered to be humanitarian aid.”)[8]
The displaced have had no choice but to remain with their relatives, in rented
apartments, in makeshift accommodations next to the ruins of their homes, or in
tented camps. As of November, thousands of families continued to live in
sections of badly damaged homes, and 120 families, including 500 children, were
still living in tents provided ten months previously by international aid
organizations. Intended
as temporary accommodations, many of the tents are unfit for use in winter.[9]
In December, the UN completed the first of 122 planned “compressed
earth block” structures, intended to improve the lives of those still
living in tented camps or in makeshift
shelters near their damaged or destroyed homes.[10]

According to the UN Refugee Welfare Agency (UNRWA), which
assists Palestinian refugees, wartime attacks destroyed public and service
sector infrastructure, including government buildings, bridges and 57
kilometers of asphalt roads (and other roads), and damaged 107 UNRWA
installations, almost 20,000 meters of pipes, four water reservoirs, 11 wells,
and sewage networks and pumping stations.[11] Because the
Israeli blockade had made building materials and supplies unavailable, as of
August, the agency reported that it would not be able to conduct US$43 million
worth of needed repairs to refugee shelters and UNRWA installations
“damaged during Operation Cast Lead."[12] A
report prepared for the UK parliament in March 2010 reported that UNRWA
remained unable to complete several housing projects, comprising some 2,400
housing units, that had been on hold since June 2007 when Israel blocked
shipments of construction materials after the Hamas takeover of Gaza.[13]
On March 24, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki Moon informed the UN Security Council
that Israel had approved shipments of cement sufficient to complete
construction of 151 housing units near Khan Younis as well as repairing several
facilities damaged during the conflict, including the Badr Flour Mill.
While welcoming the step, Ban noted that “One hundred and fifty-one units
amount to far less than 1 per cent of the needs in the shelter sector alone, to say nothing of other needs.
I have informed Israel that we will come back with more far-reaching
proposals.”[14]

Israeli attacks on Gaza’s electricity infrastructure
caused an estimated $10 million in damage, according to Gisha, an Israeli
nongovernmental organization; on January 3, the first day of the Israeli ground
offensive, Israeli attacks “damaged and put out of commission seven of
the 12 electrical power lines that connect Gaza to Israel and Egypt.”[15]
On January 13, Israeli aircraft bombed a warehouse containing spare parts
needed for repairs to the grid that it had recently allowed Gaza’s
utility, GEDCO, to import.[16]

The military offensive destroyed 18 schools (including eight
kindergartens) and damaged at least 262 other schools. In North Gaza alone,
nearly 9,000 students had to relocate to other schools after their own schools
were destroyed.[17]

The war destroyed 268 private business establishments in Gaza and damaged
another 432, causing total damage estimated at over $139 million (after
discounting for inflated claims), according to a preliminary assessment by a
Palestinian group published in February.[18] A study of the industrial
sector, published in March, reported that 324 factories and workshops were
damaged or destroyed during the war.[19]
These reports documented damage to
physical structures, equipment and machinery, inventories of raw materials and finished goods, and in
some cases, to electronic and paper documentation. As of December 2008,
prior to Israel’s military offensive, approximately 4,000 employees
worked in the establishments that were subsequently destroyed during the war.
According to the Palestine Federation of Industries, a private sector umbrella
group representing the industrial sector in Gaza, those employees’ jobs
“provide[d] for more than 24,000 people who are now impoverished as a
direct result of the war.”[20]
As of January 2010, the UN reported, Israel continued to block or severely
restrict the entry to Gaza of raw materials needed for industry, as well as
spare parts for Gaza’s sanitation and electrical networks, hindering
post-war reconstruction.

The
construction materials sub-sector was particularly devastated. Human Rights Watch researchers did not
survey all concrete ready-mix factories in Gaza, but
at all seven of the factories we examined, every vehicle on factory grounds had been demolished, and many
buildings and other pieces of equipment had been damaged or destroyed. A
preliminary survey of the damage to Gaza’s industrial sector reported in
February that the war destroyed or damaged 22 of Gaza’s 29 ready-mix
concrete factories, causing an “85 percent loss in the sub-sector’s potential capacity”
and an estimated $27 million in damages.[21]

Israel’s military offensive resulted in an estimated
$268 million in losses to the agricultural sector. This includes $180
million in direct damage during the war to fruit, grain and
vegetable crops, animal production, and infrastructure like greenhouses and
farms, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs
(OCHA). As OCHA noted, the severe damage to the agricultural sector is
cause for concern for several reasons. First, agriculture plays a vital
role in generating economic activity in Gaza, due to “the failure of
other economic sectors (including industry) to function, owing to the closure
of Gaza’s commercial crossings since June 2007.” In addition, agriculture
is a “traditional shock‐absorber”
and plays a critical role in protecting livelihoods, especially in rural areas,
“for communities whose other social safety nets fail to operate.”[22]
Agriculture is usually one of the few economic sectors that can recover quickly
after a conflict, supplying needed food and jobs, but Israel’s continuing
border blockade continues to exacerbate the damage done to the agricultural
sector by the war, by making it extremely difficult to import materials to
repair damaged infrastructure, new seedlings and farm animals, and many other
necessary inputs from peat moss to heating gas for poultry farms that are
difficult to obtain in Gaza.[23]
According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, “almost all
Gaza’s 10,000 smallholder farms suffered damage
and many have been completely destroyed” as a result of the war.[24]

A Permissive,
Destructive Policy

The conclusions this report draws relate to the unlawfulness
of Israeli destruction of property in specific locations in Gaza and are based
primarily on evidence gathered during investigations conducted in Gaza.
In addition, the destruction we documented in these cases appears consistent
with statements by Israeli politicians and military officials, and soldiers who
participated in the Gaza conflict, which described two rationales for property
destruction that conflict with the Israeli military’s obligations under
the laws of war not to destroy property except for reasons of imperative
military necessity and in accordance with the principle of proportionality.

First, statements by some Israeli politicians during and
after “Operation Cast Lead” – the stated aim of which was to
stop rocket attacks by Palestinian armed groups –suggest that a doctrine
of punitive attacks intended as a deterrent against rocket attacks may have
informed the conduct of the IDF in some cases where it destroyed property
unlawfully. Then Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni reportedly stated on
January 12, 2009, that “Hamas now understands that when you
fire on [Israel’s] citizens it responds by going wild, and this is a good
thing."[25]
Livni said on January 19, 2009, the day after the conflict ended, that
“Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent
operation, which I demanded.”[26]
Deputy Prime Minister Eli Yishai said at a conference on February 2, 2009 that
“we have to determine a price tag for every rocket fired into
Israel,” and recommended that “even if they fire at an open area or
into the sea, we must damage their infrastructures and destroy 100 houses.”[27]

Such statements are consistent with a statement and an
article published before the conflict by Israeli military officials that
advocated a doctrine of punitive property destruction intended to deter armed
groups from attacking Israel.While these statements focused on
Israel’s strategy in a future large-scale conflict in Lebanon, they are
consistent with the destruction Human Rights Watch documented in some areas of
Gaza. In October 2008, Gen.
Gadi Eisenkot, the commander of the IDF’s northern division, stated
to the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Aharonoth:

What happened in the Dahiya
quarter of Beirut in 2006 [which was severely damaged by Israeli military
attacks] will happen in every village from which Israel is fired on. … We
will apply disproportionate force on it [the village] and cause great damage
and destruction there. From our standpoint, these are not civilian villages,
they are military bases. This is not a recommendation. This is a plan. And it
has been approved.[28]

International humanitarian law prohibits as indiscriminate
any attack “which treats
as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct
military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a
similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects.”[29]
The laws of war permit attacks on military objectives such as rocket launchers
even if they are located in the midst of populated civilian areas so long as
the attacker takes precautions to minimize harm to civilians and the expected
civilian harm is proportionate to the military advantage anticipated (see “Legal
Obligations”).

The Israeli government should repudiate statements by
politicians and military officials that would apply such an unlawful, punitive
doctrine to future conflicts.

In addition to the punitive rationale according to which the
destruction of civilian property would deter future rocket attacks by
Palestinian armed groups, media reports and accounts from Israeli soldiers who
participated in the Gaza offensive suggest a second rationale for property
destruction: that the IDF would destroy property in order to
improve Israel’s military position in Gaza after the conflict.
As discussed below and in the section of this report dealing with
Israel’s legal obligations, attacks directed against civilian property
solely on the grounds that it could potentially be used for military purposes
are unlawful.

In some cases Israeli forces may have destroyed property in
areas near the border to create a buffer zone that would be devoid of cover
from which Palestinian armed groups could in future launch attacks against
Israel. This may have been the rationale for destruction of property in
one of the cases documented in this report (see
“Khuza’a”). However, the laws of war do not permit a
party to the conflict to raze all civilian structures in a given area on the
grounds that it would provide a buffer zone for a potential future armed
conflict (see “Legal Obligations”).

A reserve infantry first sergeant who fought in Operation
Cast Lead told Human Rights Watch that at a briefing before he entered Gaza,
the battalion commander of his
unit said “that the army in our area was going to there with the
intention to destroy not only pinpointed targets, but also to do destruction
for what they called ‘the day after.’”[30]
The sergeant elaborated to Breaking the Silence, an Israeli group of IDF
veterans, that “the expression ‘the day after’ was repeated
time and again, even as we were still in action.”[31]
In addition to being authorized to attack houses that have been “a source
of fire” from Palestinian armed groups, the sergeant said,

we were told there are houses to be demolished for the sake
of “the day after.” The day after is actually a thought that
obviously we're going in [to Gaza] for a limited period of time which could be
a week and it might also be a few months. […]. And the rationale was that
we want to come out with the area remaining sterile as far as we're concerned.
And the best way to do this is by razing. That way we have good firing
capacity, good visibility for observation, we can see anything, we control a
very large part of the area and very effectively.[32]

According to the sergeant, the “day after”
policy applied to any “strategic point … between half a kilometer
to over one kilometer [from the border]. I don't remember precisely so I don't
want to say, but it's at a reasonable distance [from the border].” The
sergeant gave as an example of a “strategic point” a house on a
hill from which “anyone on the top of that hill sees both the sea on one
side [to the west] and the Israeli border on the other.” The sergeant
acknowledged that he felt “a certain confusion” when it came to
putting the “day after” policy into operation. “I mean,
you see a house, so what do you do? How? I felt the orders here were somewhat
amorphous.”[33]
The sergeant, whose unit operated during the conflict in a largely open area to the east of Zeytoun, south of
Gaza City, said he knew “that this order was carried out in practice,
for some of the houses that were demolished had not been incriminated”
(i.e. they were not suspected of housing militants, booby-traps, weapons, or otherwise considered military
objects).[34]
In his area, “several [Caterpillar] D-9 bulldozers were operating around
the clock, constantly busy” destroying houses.[35]
The first sergeant said that “nobody [in the IDF] was injured in our
area,” and that he “didn’t see a single Palestinian
during my whole week there,” although other soldiers in his unit reported
sporadic attacks by Palestinian militants.[36]

In cases where the “day after” policy was
carried out in areas of Gaza near the border with Israel, the sergeant’s account is consistent with a report
by the Jerusalem Post on January 11, 2009, that “the IDF was said
to be carving out a ‘security zone’ along the border [with Gaza],
which it would retain even after an end to the fighting and use to conduct
routine patrols aimed at halting rocket attacks against the South.”[37]
It is possible that the IDF conducted extensive demolitions in order to create
such a buffer area, although the article did not mention such destruction and
the IDF did not, in fact, maintain a physical presence inside Gaza after the
war. Instead, on May 25 2009, the IDF doubled from 150 to 300 meters the
amount of territory inside Gaza’s borders that it denies to Palestinians,
by dropping leaflets warning Gaza residents to stay at least 300 meters away
from the border or risk being shot. In 2006, Palestinian militants dug a
tunnel under the Israeli-Gazan border and captured Israeli Cpl. Gilad Shalit. In June 2009,
Israeli Brig.-Gen. (ret.) Shlomo Bron told the Christian Science Monitor that
“The buffer zone makes the digging of such tunnels much more complicated
and much more difficult […]. Israel established the zone mainly because
Palestinian armed groups were attacking Israeli patrols with explosive charges
on the Israeli side of the border.”[38]

One of the cases documented in this report – the
destruction of 14 homes along the edge of the village of Khuza’a in the
south eastern Gaza Strip – involved destruction of property within one
kilometer of the Israeli border. Human Rights Watch is not aware of evidence or
any IDF claims that Palestinian fighters used the houses later destroyed in
Khuza’a as cover for tunnels, rocket or mortar attacks, or other military
activity. Apart from Khuza’a, the closest area to the border where
Human Rights Watch documented large-scale destruction is Izbt Abd Rabbo and a
nearby industrial zone, an area that lies roughly 2.5 kilometers from the
border. None of the destroyed buildings Human Rights Watch observed in
Khuza’a or Izbt Abd Rabbo were situated in elevated areas of the kind
that the IDF sergeant quoted
above described as “strategic points.”

The destruction of civilian property to create a
“sterile area” that would improve the military position of an attacker in potential future
conflicts violates international humanitarian law. While a civilian
object that provides a concrete and perceptible military advantage could be
justifiably destroyed, a civilian object does not become a target because its
destruction would offer the attacker an advantage in a hypothetical future
attack, or because of its potential future use as a military objective by the
enemy. Since allcivilian objects are potentially military
objectives, permitting destruction based on possible future use would allow the
destruction of all civilian structures. Thus, while a house protecting the
entrance to a tunnel used for military purposes would be subject to
destruction, a house that could hypothetically be used by Palestinian armed
groups sometime in the indefinite future would not be.[39]

An Israeli soldier who operated a tank in northern Gaza
during the conflict told Breaking the Silence, “the amount of destruction
there was incredible. You drive around those neighborhoods, and can't identify
a thing. Not one stone left standing over another. You see plenty of fields,
hothouses, orchards, everything devastated. Totally ruined.”[40]
The soldier said that his tank worked in conjunction with D-9 military bulldozers
to prepare “secondary
protective positions” for IDF forces behind the front lines. If
commanders in these areas “didn't
like the looks of some house, if it disturbed or threatened them, then it
would be taken down,” he said.[41]
The laws of war permit house demolitions for imperative military reasons
consistent with the laws of war. However, the soldier speculated that
only “maybe half”
of the demolitions were carried out for “operational needs.”
In other cases, it seemed to him that the destruction was gratuitous: “sometimes the company commander
would give the D-9s something to demolish just to make them happy.”[42]

Breaking the Silence provided Human Rights Watch with the
transcript of an interview the group conducted with the operator of a Caterpillar
D-9 militarized bulldozer. The D-9 driver, who requested anonymity, said
that he destroyed a large number of homes, orchards and greenhouses in an area of Gaza north of the
Sufa border-crossing near the end of Israel’s military operations.
Before he entered Gaza, the driver said, he was “shocked” by the
briefing that a commander gave his battalion:

[The commander] said, “the fact that we're a democracy works against us, for
the army cannot act as aggressively as it would like.” Then he repeated
that we're going into this operation aggressively […]. Usually in such
talks the army, the commanders mention the lives of civilians and showing
consideration to civilians. Here he didn't even mention this. Just the
brutality, go in there brutally. […] He said, “In case of any
doubt, take down houses. You don't need confirmation for anything, if you
want.”[43]

According to the D-9 driver, at a second briefing at the end
of the operation, the commander told the battalion that they had demolished 900
houses. The driver found the figure plausible, considering that “around
60” soldiers were involved in operating bulldozers and the fact that
“there were people who had been in Gaza for two days constantly
demolishing one house after the other.” He added that some demolitions
were carried out even after the ceasefire announced on January 18.

We were still going in, this time closer to the fence
[along the armistice line] and not demolishing houses, just orchards and stuff
like that. Only things that interfere with the ground. We'd flatten the ground
near the fence to expand visibility from Israel to […] 200 meters from
the fence. I didn't go in at that point, but it was 200 meters.[44]

The driver said he received radio instructions to destroy
specific houses, and was not ordered simply to raze an entire area.
Nonetheless, he said, no IDF forces followed his bulldozer unit into Gaza and
he confirmed that he was the “closing force.” Rather than using the
bulldozers to clear explosive charges to prepare the way for a subsequent
infantry incursion, he helped raze an area that had already been cleared of
militants, concealed tunnels and buildings where intelligence sources said
militants might be hiding weapons. It is unlawful to destroy civilian
property on the grounds that it might be used by the enemy in potential future
conflicts (see “Legal Obligations”). Human Rights Watch
observed destroyed civilian property in the area around the Sufa border
crossing that was more than 2.8 kilometers from the border (see
“Khuza’a, al-Shoka and al-Fokhari,” below).

Several soldiers told Breaking the Silence that they were
struck by the “nonstop” nature of home
demolitions in areas that the IDF controlled. A member of an Israeli tank
crew who had been dug-in in an unspecified residential area in Gaza for a week,
stated that Israeli troops destroyed homes in the area with explosive charges
“almost daily,
all the time,” although the area was emptied of militants and the Israeli
forces exercised control. “There were constant blasts […]. Corps of
Engineers was engaged there nonstop, with houses containing no one […],
where no one was present, and anyway those houses were monitored and I,
personally, never saw anyone in there […].”[45]

The IDF has on previous occasions destroyed property in Gaza
that even if for a purported military purpose, far exceeded the limits of
proportionality under international law – by destroying, for example,
16,000 homes in Rafah from 2000 to 2004, primarily in order to create a buffer
zone along the border with Egypt. Human Rights Watch concluded that these house razings were done
despite feasible less-destructive alternatives, including the use of ground-penetrating radar that
could have detected the presence of tunnels and tactics such as filling up
tunnel entrances with cement, indicating that the houses were destroyed “regardless of whether they posed a specific threat.”[46]

The IDF’s willingness to destroy property without
sufficient military justification or that caused disproportionate civilian loss
mirrored more general reports of military commanders sanctioning attacks on
targets without taking all feasible precautions to minimize harm to civilians.A reservist, Amir Marmor, who served as a gunner in a tank crew operating
in Jabalya, told The Jewish Chronicle:

We were there for a week and despite the fact that no-one
fired on us, the firing and demolitions continued incessantly. I am very
doubtful how many of the demolitions can be justified. We were told to expect
incoming fire from various directions; our first reaction was to blow up or
bulldoze houses in a given direction so as to give us better lines of fire. But
then no fire came from that direction, or any other.[47]

Other soldiers described an extremely permissive atmosphere
in which commanders failed to discipline soldiers who needlessly destroyed
property. “Aviv,” thesquad commander of a company
from the Givati Brigade whose forces were in the Zaytoun neighborhood south of
Gaza City, reported that soldiers vandalized houses “for no reason other
than it’s cool …. You do not get the impression from the officers
that there is any logic to it, but they won't say anything.”[48]

In a report published on July 29, 2009, the Israeli Ministry
of Foreign Affairs (MFA) stated that “extensive damage to civilian infrastructure
and personal property did occur in the course of the Gaza Operation” but
that “much of the damage was demanded by the necessities of war and was
the outcome of Hamas’ mode of operating.”[49]
The report stated that some damage was due to Hamas’s use of explosive
booby-traps, which created secondary explosions that caused damage to nearby
property after IDF attacks, and that the IDF was required to destroy some
booby-trapped buildings to protect its forces, and had to destroy other
property in order to bypass booby-trapped
roads and buildings.[50]
The MFA report did not mention the operational policy, discussed by soldiers,
to destroy property for “the day after.”

As noted, the presence or reasonable suspicion of booby-traps or stored weapons
would render otherwise civilian objects like residential buildings legitimate
military targets. According to an Israeli soldier who participated in the
ground offensive, “many explosive charges were found […]. Tank
Corps or Corps of Engineers units blew them up. Usually they did not explode
because most of the ones we found were wired and had to be detonated, but
whoever was supposed to detonate them had run off. It was live, however,
ready….”[51]
In some cases the IDF triggered booby-trap
explosives that destroyed the building in which they were planted.
Breaking the Silence published the account of a soldier who witnessed such an
incident near Zeytoun: “a D-9 bulldozer makes the rounds to verify that
the house is not booby-trapped. Suddenly the D-9 jumps in the air and the
entire ground floor collapses as well as part of the second floor.”[52]
In other cases, video footage recorded by Israeli aircraft shows secondary
explosions triggered by Israeli attacks, apparently caused by weapons stored by
Palestinian armed groups. Some of these secondary explosions appear to
have destroyed or damaged the targeted area as well as surrounding buildings.[53]

In all the cases Human Rights Watch investigated in which
large numbers of buildings were destroyed or damaged, there was clear evidence
that the destruction was carried out by Israeli anti-tank mines or bulldozers.[54]
While other instances of property destruction could have been unlawful, we did
not investigate cases that did not appear clearly to meet the laws-of-war
criteria of extensive, unnecessary destruction in areas under effective
control. In instances where Human Rights Watch found that Israeli forces could
have had a lawful military reason for destroying property, no further inquiry
was conducted, (see “Methodology”).

Similarly, IDF forces could legitimately destroy otherwise
civilian objects where there were lawful militarily necessary reasons for doing so, such
as because soldiers needed to conduct operations close to buildings that they
reasonably suspected were booby-trapped or mined in ways that could have
endangered soldiers nearby. In the cases Human Rights Watch investigated, the
large scale of the destruction and the fact that it was carried out by the IDF
days after taking control of the area are irreconcilable with such an
explanation.

The MFA report states:

IDF forces demolished structures that threatened their
troops and had to be removed. These included (1) houses which were actually
used by Hamas operatives for military purposes in the course of the fighting,
(2) other structures used by Hamas operatives for terrorist activity, (3)
structures whose total or partial destruction was imperatively required for
military necessities, such as the movement of forces from one area to another
(given that many of the roads were booby-trapped), (4) agricultural elements
used as cover for terrorist tunnels and infrastructure, and (5) infrastructure
next to the security fence between Gaza and Israel, used by Hamas for
operations against IDF forces or for digging tunnels into Israeli territory.[55]

The laws of war do not prohibit the lawful destruction of
structures, infrastructure and agricultural land that fall within the criteria
listed by the MFA report. These criteria do not apply to any of the cases
Human Rights Watch researched for this report. The prior use by Hamas forces of
civilian property is not in itself a sufficient justification under the laws of
war for its destruction. Nevertheless, Human Rights Watch did not find
evidence of Hamas deployment of fighters, weapons or ammunition in
infrastructure, or other
militarily necessary reasons for Israel to destroy the property in most of
the incidents we investigated. As noted, our conclusions are limited to
these individual incidents (which we do not claim to be representative of
broader Israeli practice) that appear to have violated the laws of war and that
Israel should investigate and repudiate so they are not repeated in future; we
did not seek to investigate, and excluded from this report, cases of destruction
that might have been due to military necessity.

Izbt Abd Rabo and Nearby Industrial Areas

IDF control of Izbt Abd Rabbo

Izbt Abd Rabbo, or the neighborhood of Abd Rabbo, is in
southern Jabalya, northeast of Gaza City, roughly 2.5 kilometers from the
armistice line with Israel. Human Rights Watch documented the complete
destruction of 45 residential structures, which had housed at least 287 people,
on or near the neighborhood’s main road during Operation Cast Lead.
Fifteen industrial establishments in the area east of the neighborhood were
also destroyed, as described below (“Industrial Areas”).
According to individual interviews with 17 residents, the vast majority of the
destruction that this report documents in Izbt Abd Rabbo took place after
January 7, by which point the IDF exercised control over the neighborhood.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence of a lawful militarily
necessary reason to destroy the swathe of homes and industrial buildings in
Izbt Abd Rabbo. Much of the destruction occurred after the IDF had
established control over the area. Military operations in the area had
largely ceased, discounting any likelihood that the large number of buildings
destroyed occurred in anticipation of imminent fighting.

Human Rights Watch did not attempt to establish the total
number of homes destroyed in the neighborhood during the December-January
conflict, but the Palestinian human rights organization Al Mezan identified 178
houses in the neighborhood as completely destroyed.[56]
Satellite imagery analysis (discussed below) showed that 341 structures were
destroyed or badly damaged in the area.

In the 24 hours after the Israeli ground offensive began on
January 3, according to neighborhood residents, Israeli forces quickly occupied
the small number of buildings on Jebel Kashif, a hill to the north that
overlooks the neighborhood, then turned south and moved towards the mosque in
the center of the neighborhood. “From the mosque [the soldiers] went
house to house, moving eastwards,” occupying houses as they progressed,
one resident said. [57]
Several residents recalled that by January 5, a tank was dug in near the mosque
in the middle of al-Quds Street, the east-west road running through the middle
of the neighborhood (usually referred to as Zimmo Street), and that Israeli
troops had occupied many of the houses along both sides of the road in the area
around the mosque. Israeli soldiers forcibly entered houses or used
megaphones to order residents to leave, detaining many of them temporarily.
Several residents told Human Rights Watch that Israeli soldiers forced them to
search houses or carry out other dangerous military tasks in violation of the
laws of war.[58]
By the morning of January 7, residents said, IDF ground forces had consolidated
their control over the western and eastern parts of Izbt Abd Rabbo.

The UN Headquarters Board of Inquiry, which was mandated to
examine damage to UN property and injuries to staff in the course of their
duties, investigated a case in which a UN vehicle convoy came under fire in
Izbt Abd Rabbo on January 8, after receiving authorization from the IDF to
drive to the area to retrieve the body of a UN employee. The Board found
that by January 5, the area was “occupied by the IDF.”[59]
The details of the incident that occurred on January 8 further substantiate the
conclusion that the IDF fully controlled the area. The IDF provided
instructions to UN staff to pass through the area at a “specific date and
time” and “not to take a particular road.”[60]

Many residents who lived on or near Zimmo Street and who
left the area between January 5 and January 12 said their homes and those of
their neighbors had not suffered serious damage at that time, and that the
closest fighting was at least 500 meters away to the west, beyond the borders
of Izbt Abd Rabbo. By January 18, when residents returned to their homes,
they found virtually the entire eastern half of the neighborhood, including
scores of houses as well as hundreds of dunams of land, had been razed by
Israeli forces.

The finding that most of the destruction in the neighborhood
occurred after the initial phase of the offensive is corroborated by satellite
imagery analysis performed by the UN Operational Satellite Applications
Programme (UNOSAT), which identified destroyed or severely damaged buildings in
Izbt Abd Rabbo over time, based on damage visible in satellite photographs.
UNOSAT found that only 11 buildings in the neighborhood were destroyed or
severely damaged between December 27, 2008 and January 6, 2009, but that 330
buildings were destroyed or severely damaged from January 6 to 19 – a
thirty-fold increase in destruction that occurred after the IDF had apparently
established control of the area.[61]

Palestinian fighters had launched rockets from the
surrounding open areas prior to the offensive, residents said. Residents
told Human Rights Watch that border observers (murabbetein) from Hamas
and other Palestinian armed groups were present in Izbt Abd Rabbo frequently
before the conflict, and that armed groups had used open areas nearby to launch
rockets at Israel. Hashem Dahalan, 49, speculated that Israeli forces
“destroyed many more houses in the eastern part of the neighborhood than
the west because the fighters who came to this area in the past [operated in]
the east.” [62]
At least one house that was destroyed early in the conflict had an escape
tunnel leading to another house, Dahalan said. While Hamas militants made use
of the area, he added, few lived there: “Only six of the destroyed houses
belonged to Hamas.” Another resident, Mahmoud Rajab Abd Rabbo, told Human
Rights Watch of tunnels in Jabal Kashif and Jabal ar-Rayes, the hills to the
north and south of Izbt Abd Rabbo, respectively.[63]
From residents’ accounts, Palestinian armed groups may have used some
houses in Izbt Abd Rabbo as cover before or after launching rockets from nearby
areas or for other military purposes.

Houses that Palestinian fighters were using as cover, which
concealed tunnels, or that otherwise comprised military objectives were subject
to lawful attack. Residents said that such buildings constituted a very
small minority of the houses in Izbt Abd Rabbo. Human Rights Watch is unaware
of any evidence that could lead the IDF to reasonably conclude that more than a
small fraction of the houses that it destroyed in the area could have
constituted military objectives, even assuming that the IDF considered it
lawful to destroy houses that militants were likely to use in future attacks
(in addition to houses whose destruction was likely to yield a concrete and
definite military advantage during the conflict, as permitted by the laws of
war). The wholesale destruction of entire blocks of buildings, even if
some could have been lawfully destroyed, would still amount to wanton
destruction under the laws of war.

At a meeting on February 4, 2010, members of the Military
Advocate General’s office told Human Rights Watch that there was
“intense fighting” in Izbt Abd Rabbo, and gave as an example
“three militants in a private dwelling who conducted an intense firefight
that went on for hours.” The MAG’s office argued that
“this incident is not unique, it occurred throughout the Strip,”
and referred to photographs published by the IDF Spokesperson’s Office of
buildings that Palestinian armed groups had used for military purposes.[64]
However, the MAG’s office could not point to any other specific
information regarding fighting or the use of civilian property for military
purposes in Izbt Abd Rabbo, and acknowledged that no photographs had been
published from the area.

According to residents and other reports, some Palestinian
fighters were present in the neighborhood at the time of the Israeli air
attacks that began on December 27, 2008 and the ensuing ground offensive that
began on January 3, 2009. The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict
noted that, according to an article published by an Israeli NGO, “Izbat
Abd Rabbo and the nearby areas of Jabal al-Kashef and Jabal al-Rayes appear to
have been among the locations in Gaza which saw the most intense combat during
the military operations.”[65]
In one incident, the article stated that on the evening of January 9, 2009,
“three RPG rockets and machine guns are fired against a house where IDF
soldiers took up positions in the Ezvet Abd Rabbo region in the eastern sector
of Jabalya.”[66]
The article was based on information from the websites of Palestinian armed
groups, which in at least one case exaggerated their military success.[67]

Human Rights Watch was unable to determine the number of
Palestinian fighters and Israeli soldiers killed or wounded in fighting in Izbt
Abd Rabbo. We interviewed several residents who said that Israeli attacks
killed at least six fighters in Izbt Abd Rabbo by January 6.
Cross-checking lists of fatalities compiled by the Palestinian Center for Human
Rights (PCHR), a non-governmental organization based in Gaza, and the Israeli
NGO B’Tselem, indicates that at least four militants (all Hamas) were
killed in Izbt Abd Rabbo on January 3, 12, and 18 (two fatalities).[68]

While some fighting between Israeli and Palestinian forces
occurred in the neighborhood during the Israeli ground incursion, as noted,
residents reported that the neighborhood was under IDF control when they left
the area between January 5 and 14. The fact that three Palestinian fighters
were killed during fighting in or around Izbt Abd Rabbo after January 5 may
indicate that armed groups counter attacked in the area, raising the
possibility that some property was damaged by such an attack or by defending
IDF forces. Human Rights Watch spoke to one resident who remained in the
area throughout the incursion and did not witness any fighting after the
beginning of the incursion, although he remained in his home and therefore had
a restricted field of vision.[69]
However, as this section discusses, statements by witnesses and physical
evidence, including the extensive nature of the destruction, strongly suggest
that the vast majority of destruction to civilian property was not the result
of fighting or lawful as a matter of military necessity as discussed
previously.

Israeli troops entered the middle section of Izbt Abd Rabbo
late on January 3. One resident told Human Rights Watch that he heard
gunfire at around midnight, and that Israeli soldiers entered the village from
the north later that night.[70]
He said that he heard tank fire coming from Jebel Kashif on January 4 at 8 a.m.

Hashem Dahalan said he saw soldiers enter the neighborhood
on foot at 6 a.m. on January 4 from Jebel Kashif. “A huge number of
troops, hundreds, were breaking into houses, clearing and securing them.
Already that morning the troops were in the two houses opposite mine.”[71]
He said that later that day, IDF bulldozers created an earthen wall on Jebel
Kashif, and Israeli forces occupied a white house on the hill, and set up
snipers who “fired at my house whenever the curtains moved.”
During the rest of the incursion, he said, “two tanks would stay on Jebel
Kashif at night, but at 8 a.m. more would come in from the east, along with
bulldozers.” The IDF quickly gained control over the area,
according to Dahalan.

Ghazzala Salama Abu Freih, 60, lives in a multi-story
concrete house (which was not destroyed) that commands a view of the town from
the southeastern side of Jebel Kashif. Ghazzala told Human Rights Watch
that Israeli soldiers appeared in front of her house at 7 a.m. on January
4. “We were afraid they’d demolish the house, so I asked my
daughter-in-law to wake up the kids, so that they’d make some noises
[and] show the soldiers there were children. Then they [the soldiers] broke
into the house.”[72]
The soldiers gathered Ghazzala and her sons and their families into the living
room on the ground floor, and occupied the house, firing from the upstairs and
not allowing the families to leave until January 14, “two days after our
bread ran out.”

Residents reported some fighting in the neighborhood during
January 3, 4 and 5—the first three days of the Israeli ground
invasion. Hashem Dahalan, 49, who remained in the area throughout the
period of the war, told Human Rights Watch of two militants who were killed by
Israeli shelling on January 3 near the house of M’Salam al-Haddad, a tile
warehouse owner; another fighter was killed on January 4 during clashes on
Jebel Kashif; and two others were killed in the middle of the village, on an
unknown date.[73]
Dahalan said that on January 5 and 6, he heard exchanges of fire to the
northwest, on the far side of Jebel Kashif from his home, but he knew of no
other fighting near Izbt Abd Rabbo. Dahalan, a security employee of the
Palestinian Authority, said that Hamas limited its activity in the area during
the fighting, and he criticized Hamas for failing to seize “an historic
opportunity to engage the IDF, who actually entered the area on
foot.” According to resident Mahmoud Rajab Abd Rabbo, the only
fighter from Izbt Abd Rabbo killed during the offensive was Muhammad Nahed Abd
Rabbo, a member of Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades.[74]
On January 1, Mahmoud said, Muhammad’s father’s house was struck by
a bomb or missile. Mahmoud corroborated the information that IDF forces killed
two militants near the home of M’Salam al-Haddad and another one on Jabal
Kashif, and said that three fighters were killed around the mosque in the
middle of town. Another three fighters were killed near the intersection
of Zimmo Street and Salahaddin Road, Gaza’s major north-south artery, he
said. Another witness, Majdi Abd Rabbo, told Human Rights Watch that the
IDF detained him for two days, starting on January 5, and forced him to act as
a messenger between the IDF and three injured Hamas fighters who were trapped
in a house.[75]
According to Majdi, the IDF attacked and killed the three fighters on the night
of January 6.

Jumaa Mbarak Salaam, 25, a shepherd, said that he and his
family evacuated their home on the second day of the ground offensive, around
January 5. “When we were leaving there was still resistance and a few
clashes but it was closer to Salahaddin Road [to the west of Izbt Abd Rabbo]
than to the Eastern Line [to the east]. They were hiding but we saw rockets
being fired and heard mortars, it was very frequent. But none of the
fighters were in this neighborhood. Their most advanced [eastern] location was
by Salahaddin Road.”[76]Because the IDF held the territory and continued to advance further into
Gaza from Izbt Abd Rabbo, it appears unlikely that rocket-launching squads
would have advanced into IDF-held territory after Salaam left the area on January
5. As discussed below, most of the destruction occurred after Israeli troops
consolidated their control over the village by January 7.

Many residents of Izbt Abd Rabbo described similar
experiences: they were evicted from their homes by IDF troops or fled due to
intense shelling, went west along Zimmo Street, and were then stopped and
detained by other IDF troops. The soldiers let women and children proceed but
kept the men, examined their ID cards, and let them go hours or days
later. In some cases, Israeli forces transferred detained men to Israeli
territory; in other cases, beginning on January 5 the IDF forced some detained
Palestinian men from the neighborhood to perform dangerous tasks of a military
nature.[77]
For example, Israeli soldiers forced Majdi Abd Rabbo at gunpoint to repeatedly
enter a building in which three Palestinian militants had entered.[78]
These cases, which involved Israeli troops setting up what amounted to check-points at which they
stopped, identified, and separated people attempting to leave the neighborhood,
indicate IDF control of the center of the neighborhood.

Arif Salman al-Err, 32, said that Israeli forces detained
him on January 4 as he was trying to leave the area. Arif said that he
saw a shell hit the home of his relative Muhammad Muhammad al-Err, 55, at
sunset on Saturday, January 3.[79]
On January 4 at around 10 a.m., Arif decided to evacuate his family from their
home south of Zimmo Street on the east side of Izbt Abd Rabbo. Arif and
his family walked 450 meters west along Zimmo Street until they reached the
mosque. Israeli soldiers wearing green uniforms came out of a house, and
separated him from his family, blindfolded him, put him in plastic handcuffs,
and took him into the house, where four other men were being detained,
including the owner of the house, Abu Lafih. Arif said IDF troops
“used me as a human shield” the following day, January 5, forcing
him to knock on the door of a nearby house and then to walk in front of an
Israeli soldier up the stairs as the building was searched. On January 6,
Arif said he was taken in an armored vehicle to a bus, which drove for an hour
to an army base where 50 men were detained. After two days, he was
released at the Erez crossing into Gaza. “They did not tell us which road
to take, they just said, ‘Yalla, everyone go home.’ We went
to Jabalya camp.” When Arif and his family returned to Izbt Abd
Rabbo after the war, on January 18, his home and three neighboring houses
belonging to his relatives had been destroyed, leaving 37 people
homeless.

Sabir Abu Freih told Human Rights Watch that he decided to
flee from his home near the al-Err block after the area was heavily shelled,
and he heard a soldier with a megaphone ordering all families to leave; he
believes the date was the first Tuesday of the ground offensive, or January 6.[80]
When he left the area, he said, the Abu Freih family’s five houses were
all standing. When he returned after the war, they were all destroyed,
displacing 31 people.

Akram Ayesh Abd Rabbo, 40, told Human Rights Watch that
Israeli soldiers in the neighborhood took him out of his house on January 7.[81]
They made him move with them for two days and, in violation of the prohibition
against “human shielding,” they forced him at gunpoint to search
homes for Palestinian fighters and weapons. According to these residents,
major fighting had ceased and Israeli forces controlled the area during the
time they were in IDF custody.

Su’ad Muhammad Abd Rabbo, 54, who lived in a
multi-story concrete residence facing Zimmo Street, told Human Rights Watch
that on January 7, “while we were praying the afternoon prayer,” an Israeli soldier with a
megaphone ordered the 13 residents of the house to leave.[82]
“The kids ran out, but I tried to get some ID cards and jewelry. I wanted
to lock the door but the soldiers prevented me. He said, ‘We are
here.’” She returned after the war to find her home
demolished.[83]

Esmahan Abu Rashid, 44, and her sister, Nariman Abu Rashid,
43, fled Izbt Abd Rabbo on the afternoon of January 7.[84]
The Abu Rashids were among 19 people living in a four-room, one-story building
near the al-Err block, also on the south side of Zimmo Street. At 11 a.m. on
Wednesday, January 7, shrapnel from shells that hit a neighbor’s home
killed their mother, Badir M’Hammed Abu Rashid, 72. Neighbors told
the family that there would be a lull in the fighting that afternoon –
Israel first announced a daily “humanitarian pause” on January 7
– and a group of 15 family members evacuated their building at around 2
p.m. Esmahan told Human Rights Watch that she helped carry her mother’s
body, wrapped in a blanket, west along Zimmo Street toward Salahaddin Road, the
main north-south artery in Gaza, half a mile to the west. Israeli forces
controlled the areas they passed through: “The soldiers were in the
houses. There was a tank in the road where Aish Abd Rabbo’s house is, and
there were soldiers in the house near the tank. They forced us to stay
there for four hours.” As they left the area, Esmahan said, she saw
that her own home, three homes belonging to the Siyyam family, and the large
buildings belonging to the Shreiteh family and to the al-Haddad family were
still standing and had suffered only minor damage from shrapnel. All were
subsequently destroyed.

‘Aid Daher, 34, interviewed separately, also saw the
Abu Rashid family carry the body of Badir M’Hammed along Zimmo Street
that day.[85]
Daher had previously tried to leave the area but was detained by the IDF at the
point where a tank was dug in on Zimmo Street en route toward the junction with
Salahaddin Road. Israeli troops stopped his group, let the women and children
go, and detained six of the men for approximately three hours, along with about
50 other young men, in a house. According to Daher, IDF forces were also present
to the south of his house, not only along Zimmo Street to the north.
“Only one house was destroyed then, Majdi Abd Rabbo’s,” he
said. When Daher returned to the area after the war, the building that
had housed him and 21 members of his family was destroyed. Daher pointed
out two destroyed homes nearby, including one belonging to his neighbor Abdel
Aziz Shreiteh, where 14 people had lived.

Samih al-Sheikh, 25,told Human Rights Watch that his
family evacuated their home on the fifth day of the ground offensive, around
January 7, “because at noon, when all 16 of us were downstairs, my
brother Ihab’s apartment was hit by a shell fired from the north.”[86]
At 2 p.m., when the family had heard there would be a lull, they waved a white
flag to convey their civilian status and came outside. They walked the
west along Zimmo Street but were stopped at the mosque, which was still
standing. “They forced us to sit on the street for two hours, they took
our IDs, and after that they let us go. They kept all of us there, women and
men. There was no destruction yet, but the soldiers were occupying all the
alleyways and houses, including the houses that were not facing the
road.” Al-Sheikh said that after the war, his family “came back
naturally, not expecting anything, we were expecting to see the house. And it
was destroyed with landmines. Hamas later took the shrapnel.”[87]
Al-Sheikh also pointed out two bulldozed houses near his, where Akram Abd Rabbo
lived with his family of five; and where Isma’il Saleh lived alone.

Mahmoud Rajab Abd Rabbo said he left his home, where 34
people had gathered, on the fifth day of the ground offensive – on or
around January 8.[88]
Tanks positioned on Jebel Reyes, a hill to the south of Izbt Abd Rabbo, fired
into his area from 8 a.m. to 1 p.m., hitting the third floor and the ground
floor, and troops forcibly entered the house at 2 p.m., evicting them and
telling them to go to Jabalya. He and three other men were detained when
they reached a tank stationed in Zimmo Street near the mosque; at 11 p.m. they
were released and went to Jabalya. “When we left, the IDF had
control of the whole area until we crossed Salahaddin Street,” Mahmoud
said. “They occupied all the high houses.” According to
Mahmoud, Majid Abd Rabbo’s house, near the mosque, and Adnan
Jneid’s house, to the southeast, had been partly demolished by
bulldozers, but that he saw no other destruction. The mosque was still
standing.

Mahmoud said that in the three years he lived in Izbt Abd
Rabbo he had witnessed four incursions, each of which had damaged his
home. This time, he said, Hamas de-miners found after the fighting that
the IDF had rigged six mines which completely destroyed the three-story house, leaving
more than 30 people homeless. The house cost around 200,000 Jordanian
dinars [$280,000], he said. “We have no money to rebuild the house, and
anyway the [border] crossings are closed [to cement]. And if we rebuilt
they’d just destroy it again.” To the northeast, he added,
“we had three dunams [0.3 hectares] of olive trees, which they destroyed
in the past, so we planted it with wheat, but they destroyed that
too.”

M’Salam al-Haddad, 58, fled the area at 8 a.m. on
January 9. Al-Haddad lived with 25 members of his extended family in a
four-story building next to his large warehouse of imported ceramic tiles on
the northern side of Zimmo Street. Al-Haddad told Human Rights Watch that the
family spent the first week of the ground incursion on the ground floor of his
home, but that two tank shells hit the third floor early on the morning of
January 9, by which time he had run out of water and insulin for his son Anas,
12, who suffers from diabetes.[89]
“Before I left, I went up to the fourth floor” to try to judge the
safest route, al-Haddad said. “There were tanks 150 meters east of the
Eastern Line, and I thought the infantry was already to the west. So we
raised about six white flags and empty water bottles, and we walked along Zimmo
Road to the Eastern Line and went north to Beit Lahiya.”

When he fled Izbt Abd Rabbo, al-Haddad said, his home and
tile warehouse were otherwise not damaged apart from the third floor.
When he returned, he said, “I didn’t even recognize the road to my
house.” He found that his home and warehouse had been flattened.
“I found 13 mines here [in the house], including unexploded ones. The big
transport truck [for moving tiles from the warehouse] was pushed into my
swimming pool.” Human Rights Watch observed bulldozer tracks around the
steel support pillars of the destroyed warehouse, and examined a large steel
cable that al-Haddad speculated the IDF had used to tear down some of the
pillars. The eight dunams (0.8 hectares) of fruit trees al-Haddad planted
five years ago were destroyed as well.

“I was the biggest importer of tiles in Gaza,”
al-Haddad said. “I got them from Spain, Portugal, Italy, Egypt, India,
China. I had a huge stock from before the [Israeli border] closure [in
June 2007] because no new houses were being built, since there was no
cement. I have insurance, but it doesn’t cover the war.” He
estimated the total damage to his warehouse, tiles, land and home at $1.7
million.

Majid al-Athamna, al-Haddad’s neighbor to the
northwest, attempted to leave the neighborhood on January 10 but that Israeli
troops prevented him from doing so until January 12. Majid’s home
had an unobstructed view of the south and east sides of Jebel Kashif. He
told Human Rights Watch that he saw Israeli forces enter the area from the
northeast and take over Jebel Kashif on the evening of January 3.[90]
Tanks established a base on the hill, and at around 4:30 a.m. on January 4,
bulldozers pushed up earthen barricades around the base. Later that day,
at around sunset, Majid said he saw two missiles hit the bedroom of his brother
Ra’id’s home. At noon on January 5, Israeli forces destroyed a
concrete water tank on Jebel Kashef, and bulldozers attacked four houses on the
eastern side of the hill. “The bulldozers would hit the
support pillars on one side of the house,” Majid said, “then move
around to the other side after the house listed.” On January 7, Israeli
bulldozers began to raze Majid’s agricultural land on the hillside.
Before sunset on January 9, bulldozers went through a cow farm to the west and
demolished two houses, then withdrew back up the hill. On January 10,
according to Majid, “tanks came west along Zimmo Street and destroyed
al-Haddad’s olive trees on the north side of it, and the Siyyam
family’s wall on the south side.” As the fighting continued, more
and more members of his extended family moved into his house, a total of 57
people.

By the night of January 10, Majid said, the group decided to
try to escape the area.

We sent women out with white flags, but there were three
tanks and several bulldozers in the street that fired at the women. They
[troops] came to my house at 5 a.m. They were on foot, and firing, so we
clustered under the stairway. They called to us with a megaphone and said, in
Arabic: “Everyone come out, men, women and children. You have five
minutes.” They hit the northwest room, I don’t know with what
[munition], and I went out and raised my hands. I moved all 57 of us to the
garage. They took my son, Wa’el, though I don’t know why,
since he’s a PA employee [rather than a member of Hamas].

Eventually, at 7:30 a.m. on January 12, Majid said Israeli
troops told him to evacuate the group to Jabalya. Israeli forces were in
control of the area at the time, Majid said. His group walked east along
Zimmo Street, which was badly damaged with craters, to the Eastern Line, and
began walking north, where he said Israeli troops humiliated some of the group
by forcing them to lie down in a crater of mud. Another witness told
Human Rights Watch that when she left the area on January 14, the houses
belonging to the al-Athamna family and the tile warehouse owned by
M’Salam al-Haddad were still standing.

When he returned the following Sunday, January 18, Majid
said, he found his house was destroyed, along with four other homes on the same
block belonging to his children and relatives. Hashem Dahalan,
interviewed separately, confirmed that he witnessed Israeli troops destroy two
of Majid’s family’s homes with anti-tank mines, and another two
with bulldozers.[91]
Majid said that Hamas de-miners had removed a total of 18 anti-tank mines, some
of which had failed to detonate, from the houses. He also found his three
cars crushed.

Majid said he was still paying loans on his destroyed home.
“There are still four Hamas houses standing on Zimmo Street, but mine is
destroyed,” he said. “Were my cars launching rockets? Why did they
destroy them?”

Ghazzala Salama Abu Freih, 60, left Izbt Abd Rabbo with her
family at sunset on January 14, after Israeli soldiers occupied their home and
detained them there. The Abu Freih family walked west along Zimmo Street,
which “was full of soldiers,” Ghazzala said.[92]
A few homes had already been destroyed at that point, she said, and during the
time Israeli soldiers occupied her house she was aware of several
home-demolitions where Israeli forces used explosives. The soldiers
prohibited her from looking out the window, but “when they wanted to blow
up a house they’d ask my brother to take the windows out so they
wouldn’t shatter. When we returned after a few nights, we found all the
windows had been smashed after we left.” She believed Israeli troops were
responsible for the damage, presumably as they were withdrawing.

Hashem Dahalan, whose own building was damaged but not
demolished and who remained in it throughout the war, said that almost all of
the houses the IDF destroyed in Izbt Abd Rabbo, with nine or ten exceptions,
were mined or bulldozed during the last four days of the war.[93]
Many of the larger homes constructed with reinforced-concrete-were mined, he
said.

I saw a special tank come in with a big cube of mines on
it. I saw them making an “X” on the support pillars of the
houses they were going to destroy. Some of the houses got six or eight mines.
All of the mines would blow up at the same time.

In addition to the nine or ten homes Dahalan described as
having been destroyed relatively early during the war, Su’ad Abd Rabbo,
54, named another three houses that had been already destroyed when she left,
on January 7.[94] She also said that “the airplanes had been hitting
constantly” a citrus grove, directly to the south of her home, during the
aerial offensive. (Residents made homeless by the war had set up a tent
camp in the grove when Human Rights Watch visited in January and again in
April.) Su’ad also said that houses to the south of Izbt Abd Rabbo,
in the Dordona area near al-Kerem Street (the next east-west street south of
Zimmo Street), were demolished on January 4. Su’ad said that most of the
houses in the area were still standing when she left.

Many residents of Izbt Abd Rabbo returned to their property
after the war to find that their agricultural land had also been
destroyed. In total, Majid al-Athamna said, his family lost nine dunams
(0.9 hectares) of lemon and olive trees, which he said were razed by Israeli
bulldozers.[95]
Gharib Muhammad Nabhar, 59, a farmer, left his home during the aerial campaign
in late December. When he returned after the war, he found the four dunams (0.4
hectares) of mature lemon trees he tended had been demolished, and that
“a bulldozer had pushed my house and the pump of my water well down the
street.”[96]
Five people lived in his house, he said, and the grove provided jobs for 30
people.

Industrial Areas

The Eastern Line is a main north-south road that runs
roughly parallel to the 1949 armistice line with Israel, Gaza’s de facto
border, for the length of the Gaza Strip. When it passes by Izbt Abd
Rabbo, the Eastern Line is roughly 2.5 kilometers to the west of the
border. Moving from north to south, the Eastern Line passes to the east
of Jabalya, Izbt Abd Rabbo, Tuffah, and then the Shaja’iya area.
Prior to the war, in the areas north and south of Izbt Abd Rabbo, both sides of
the Eastern Line were lined with industrial establishments.

Human Rights Watch research documented the destruction of
six factories and six warehouses in the industrial area along the Eastern Line
during “Operation Cast Lead.” We identified but did not
investigate three other destroyed factories in the area. We did not
attempt to document all the destruction in the industrial zone, but a large
majority of the buildings along the Eastern Line appeared to have been damaged
or destroyed. Human Rights Watch is not aware of any information or claims that
Palestinian armed groups used the warehouse areas as cover for rocket launches
or other attacks, or that the IDF could have otherwise lawfully destroyed them
for reasons of military necessity.

A doctor who lives in the Shajai’ya area, south of
Izbt Abd Rabbo, described the timing and extent of the Israeli ground offensive
in this area of Gaza. “The IDF occupied the entire area east of the
Eastern Line and stayed there for the whole war. The tanks were already
on the Eastern Line maybe on the first or second day [of the ground
invasion].”[97]
In addition, Israeli forces also drove quickly in to Izbt Abd Rabbo and also to
the north and south of Shaja’iya,close enough that residents
of Shaja’iya “remained within sniper range,” the doctor
said. The doctor stated that “the resistance [Palestinian armed
groups] was not active” in the industrial zone or in Shaja’iya
during the war. The doctor, who identified himself as a Fatah supporter
and noted his dislike for Hamas, told Human Rights Watch that he fled the area
on January 4 after seeing his neighbors’ apartment burn down and did not
witness the destruction of structures in the industrial area, but that he knew
the positions of Israeli forces because he came back repeatedly during the
three-hour “humanitarian pause” Israel announced on January 7.

Wadiyya Sweet Factories

The al-Wadiyya family owns the Sarayo factory, which
manufactured biscuits, chips, and ras al-abid (a kind of sweet) and was
located on the eastern side of the Eastern Line, near Izbt Abd Rabbo, at a
distance of more than two kilometers from the de facto border with Israel.[98]
The factory compound included the al-Wadiyya’s al-Amir ice cream
factory, and a small building used to produce Dulci-brand sweets.

Naaman al-Khodary, 35, production manager at the Sarayo
factory, said he was not present at the factory during the beginning of the
Israeli offensive, but that he visited it on January 7 during the lull in the
fighting. “I didn’t see any troops so I came to the factory
and got some cans of gasoline. But on my way out I saw tanks to the west that I
hadn’t seen on my way in, so I locked the door and walked away
quietly. None of the factories had been destroyed at that point.”[99]

Human Rights Watch inspected the destroyed factories and the
factory grounds. All three facilities in the compound were largely destroyed,
and four completely charred mid-sized trucks were next to the factory. The
grounds of the compound were covered with heavy bulldozer tracks leading up to
the factory buildings. Al-Khodary pointed out “ramps” next to
the Sarayo factory, which bulldozers had made out of raw food materials and
packing materials, that led from the ground up to the factory’s second
floor.

Al-Khodary said that he and other workers found heavy,
jagged metal shrapnel up to eight inches long in the factory. Human
Rights Watch did not view these fragments, but shrapnel of this size would
suggest the factory was hit with artillery or tank fire.

Al-Khodary said he did not know of any witnesses to the
destruction. “There was a guard here, Abd al-Majid Khader, around
65-years old. After the war we found his body in the hospital, but it was in
such bad shape we could hardly identify it.” Al-Khodary said Khader
had been killed at the factory site, but did not know the date or
circumstances.

Al-Khodary said Sarayo was the biggest biscuit factory in
Gaza and would be difficult to repair. “The process was, the dough was
mixed, then formed, and then sent through the ovens. [The IDF] hit the
ovens. They hit the middle of the production line. The sheet that rolls through
the ovens is 120 centimeters wide.”

The factory owner, Yassir al-Wadiyya, said that at this
location and the family’s six other factories and warehouses in eastern
Gaza, the IDF destroyed US$22 million in equipment, facilities, vehicles and
refrigerators.[100]
Al-Wadiyya said that rebuilding the factories would be prohibitively expensive
due to the Israeli blockade of Gaza’s borders. “A bag of
cement now costs almost $64, when it used to be around $5,” he said.

Warehouses near the Macca Cola factory

To the south of the al-Wadiyya factories, on the western
side of the Eastern Line (slightly further away from the de facto Israeli
border), Human Rights Watch visited four completely charred and gutted
warehouses, which are between the road and a large Macca Cola bottling
plant. The owner of the warehouses, Hossam Said Hassanein, 40, said two
of the destroyed buildings had been a dried food warehouse and a fluorescent
light bulb warehouse; two smaller buildings were used as a carpentry shop and
an industrial laundry.[101]
Hassanein said he owned two other warehouses elsewhere that were also damaged
during the war; in total, his three properties suffered roughly US $850,000 in
damages.

According to Hassanein, local residents told him the
warehouses were set ablaze “three days before the end of the war,”
or around January 15. “We found eight or nine artillery shells, all of
them were in one piece, around 70 centimeters long.” Human Rights
Watch identified one green-painted white phosphorus shell that Hassanein said had
landed in the Macca Cola bottling factory area behind the warehouses.

Imad Nassir Houssu, 30, a warehouse guard, confirmed that
the warehouses were destroyed late in the war, on around January 15.
Houssu said he spent most of the war sheltering just south of the warehouse area
in the Wafa Rehal Center for the Elderly, which occupies part of a multi-story
hospital complex and from which it would be possible to have seen fires in the
warehouses. “When they announced the lull in the fighting [on
January 7], I came back here. These warehouses were fine. Then two days
before the withdrawal [around January 15] they hit all these buildings. I saw
the [white phosphorus] shells exploding over here, and the fire lasted one or
two days.”[102]
After the war, he said, he saw bulldozer track marks around the food storage
warehouse, which had been flattened.

It is not clear why the IDF fired air-burst white phosphorus
munitions over the factory areas on around January 15. While many
militaries use white phosphorus to screen troop movements, the white phosphorus
that hit the warehouses was apparently fired two days before the IDF began to
withdraw from Gaza late at night on January 17.[103]

Although Jebel Rayes – from which residents of Izbt
Abd Rabbo said rockets were fired prior to the war – and open fields lie
to the northwest of the Macca Cola plant, Houssu and Hassanein insisted that no
Palestinian fighters were in the area during the war. “It was impossible
to move here, there were drones flying and fighters would have had to cross
open fields to get here,” said Houssu. “The closest they
[Palestinian fighters] got was around 700 meters away, 400 meters east of
Salahaddin Street.”

Gaza Juice factory

In the Tuffah area opposite the Eastern Line from the Macca
Cola plant is the Gaza Juice Factory, owned by the Palestinian Food Industries
Co. Bulldozers and several kinds of munitions badly damaged the factory
buildings and production equipment. After the war, factory employees said
they collected anti-tank mines and shrapnel from what appeared to be high
explosive artillery or tank shells from factory grounds, along with other
weapons, which they showed to Human Rights Watch.[104]

Production engineer Ibrahim al-Sweitti, 50, recalled
visiting the factory on January 7, during the first three-hour lull in the
fighting. “Nothing had hit the buildings yet. Our guards were still
here. The factory burned on January 15. We saw it on the news. It
was a huge fire, it burned for two days, but it was impossible to get here
[because of the presence of Israeli troops].”[105]

Said al-Ghoula, 40, and his brother Bassam, 38, are both
security guards at the factory. Said confirmed that “the
destruction happened here during the last three days of the war.”[106]
They lived a 10-minutes’ walk from the factory and managed to walk to the
Wafa hospital compound to the southwest, across the Eastern Line, during the
unilateral pause in the fighting Israel first implemented on January 7. Bassam
told Human Rights Watch that on the day the factory was on fire, he and Said
had tried to walk to it again, but “We couldn’t get close. We came
on the next day to a place 200 meters south of here. The IDF was in the grove
to the north of the factory.”[107]

Said and Bassam al-Ghoula, interviewed separately, said the
IDF was firmly in control of the area for more than a week before the factory
was burned. Bassam recalled an occasion prior to the factory’s
destruction when he came under fire from the grove north of the factory while
trying to walk from the Wafa hospital complex towards the factory.
According to Bassam, “there was no resistance here. Everyone had left
within the first 10 days [of the attacks that began on December
27].”

The factory’s owners estimate the total damage to the
factory caused by the Israeli military offensive at more than $1,924,000.
A report prepared by the Palestine Food Industries Co. detailed extensive
damage to the factory’s refrigeration units, evaporator (for condensing
juice), production lines and storage tanks, electrical panels, and structural
damage to the factory and administration buildings and storehouses.[108]
Al-Sweitti, the production engineer, showed Human Rights Watch the evaporator
and eight juice-extracting machines on the production line. The eight machines
“were installed in 1993 by an Italian company. The first two are wrecked
but the rest can be repaired. Each costs $200,000.” As a result of
the damage, al-Sweitti said, the factory was working at 10 percent capacity.
Unlike most other Gaza factories, “we were actually working close to
capacity before the war, because all the raw materials are fruit from
Gaza.” The destroyed refrigeration units had also been storing
goods for other companies as well as raw materials for the juice factory.

Abu Eida Cement Factory

A preliminary survey of the damage to Gaza’s
industrial sector reported in February that the war destroyed or damaged 22 of
Gaza’s 29 ready-mix concrete factories, causing an “85 percent loss
in the sub-sector’s potential capacity.”[109]
Most cement factories had previously been rendered idle by the blockade imposed
on Gaza by Israel and Egypt. Since 2007, Israel generally prohibited
cement imports from entering Gaza on the grounds that Palestinian armed groups
could use cement for military purposes; the lack of cement meant Gaza cement factories
could only undertake Israeli-approved projects for which imports were
authorized.

As discussed in the Summary, during “Operation Cast
Lead,” Israel could have lawfully attacked otherwise civilian
objects if they were making an effective contribution to Palestinian armed
groups’ military action and their destruction offered a definite military
advantage at the time. For example, if armed groups had commandeered
concrete factories during the fighting and were using the concrete produced to
build or repair military objects like bunkers, such factories could have been
legitimate targets for Israeli attack. However, Gaza’s concrete
factories were unable to operate at all prior to and during the war because
they had run out of cement, which they must import due to their lack of
capacity to produce it. There is no evidence that any of the cement and
concrete factories in Gaza contributed to the military efforts of Palestinian
armed groups during the fighting.

The cement factory owned by the Abu Eida family near Izbt
Abd Rabbo was, according to its owners, the largest such facility in Gaza prior
to the war. Human Rights Watch is not aware of any information or claims
that would have rendered it subject to lawful attack.

Abd Rabbo Abu Eida, 70, a partner in the factory, told Human
Rights Watch that he and other members of his family spent the first days of
the war locked in their homes, which were set further back on the property
behind the factory grounds. Israeli forces attacked the property on January
3, he said. “With the ground offensive, the shells were falling all
around, and when the tanks got close they opened machine gun fire at the
[cement] storage tanks and the windows. Then the tanks and bulldozers came and
leveled the walls and trees around the houses.”[110]

On Sunday, January 4, Abu Eida said, he and his relatives
raised white flags, left their homes, and fled the area. “At this
point the factory grounds were destroyed but the [factory] buildings and the
houses were still OK. When the war ended we came back here and we found the
houses demolished and the factory too. We knew it was bulldozers because the
cement trucks and pumps had been dragged and turned over.”

Another member of the extended family, Yusuf Abu Eida, 35,
interviewed separately, fled with a second group on January 7. Yusuf said
he witnessed militarized bulldozers destroying the factory grounds, as well as
“the walls and surroundings and cars and gardens and the cattle
shed” during the first days of the ground invasion.[111]
He could observe the destruction from a three-story building where he lived
with two other brothers and their families, at the back of the lot slightly to
the west of the factory area. “The tank shells were hitting the
houses while we were inside. Then they calmed down suddenly around 1:30
or 2 p.m., during the ceasefire [on January 7], so we waited for about 15
minutes and left. There were 70 of us who left at the same time.” Yusuf
said this large group walked north because “we knew the tanks had already
gone down to the southwest.” The fact that some tanks had advanced
further into Gaza by January 7, the day that Yusuf and his group apparently
fled Izbt Abd Rabbo, suggests that by that date the entire area was already
under IDF control.

According to Yusuf, during the period from the beginning of
the war until January 7, “The only resistance [from Palestinian armed
groups] was on the other side of Salahaddin Street,” roughly a kilometer
away.

Human Rights Watch viewed the crushed remains of seven cement
mixing trucks, three cement pump trucks, one fork lift, and three cars that had
been destroyed on factory grounds. Most of the mixing and pump trucks had
been pushed over on their sides and partly crushed; the smaller vehicles had
been run over and were completely flattened, apparently by tanks or large
bulldozers given the tread-marks still visible in the soil and imprinted, in
some cases, into the metal surfaces of the destroyed vehicles. A building
housing a generator, a water well, a small outbuilding across the street, a
multi-story concrete administrative building, and two silos used to store
cement were also destroyed.

Human Rights Watch observed eight of the family’s
private homes at the back of the large lot that also housed the cement factory,
which were totally destroyed.[112]
Abd Rabbo Abu Eida said he believed that the private homes, including his own,
had been demolished with anti-tank landmines. Human Rights Watch examined
these buildings. The interior side of several structural support pillars
of the building Abu Eida pointed out as his home were charred and seemed to
have blown outwards, which would be consistent with mining, although Human
Rights Watch could not find the remnants of mines at the site.

The extended family members who lived there are currently
displaced and live in apartments throughout northern Gaza.

According to Abu Eida, the machinery and vehicles destroyed
included those used by the factory as well as those recently purchased from
another cement factory in Beit Lahiya which had not yet been installed.[113]
He said the family also owned another cement factory in the eastern Gaza Strip
that was also destroyed during the war. He estimated the total losses the
family suffered at US $12 million.[114]

Jamal Abu Eida, 45, another family partner in the business,
said the factory was built in 1993. “We had to change the plans 23 times
before Israel would give us the ISO certificate. But then the Israelis
didn’t make us pay taxes. They encouraged us to be here.”[115]
According to Jamal, “Our factories were the biggest in Gaza, they could
produce up to 120 cubic meters of cement per hour at full capacity, and we took
on the biggest projects because we had the tallest cement pumping
trucks.” The Abu Eida factory had supplied the cement for the Gaza
power station, Jamal said, and had won the contract to work on an EU-funded
project to create sewage treatment ponds to reduce the strain on the dangerous
Beit Lahiya sewage lagoon.[116]
The Abu Eida factory had been scheduled to receive concrete imports from Israel
that were designated for the project – making it unique among
Gaza’s cement factories, which had largely been shut down due to lack of
raw materials by Israel’s border blockade.

Al-Qonouz cement factory and al-Dalon home

None of the owners or workers at the al-Qonouz factory were
present when Human Rights Watch visited the site, but researchers spoke with
Rashid al-Dalon, 46, whose destroyed home is 25 meters south of the factory on
the western side of the Eastern Line. As with the other structures
destroyed in the area, Human Rights Watch is not aware of any information or
claims that Palestinian armed groups used these structures or that their
destruction was militarily necessary.

According to al-Dalon, Israeli militarized bulldozers
destroyed part of the factory on January 4, the first full day of the ground
invasion. “I saw the bulldozers knock down the two silos used to
hold cement powder,” he said.[117]
There were no Palestinian fighters present on factory grounds at the time,
al-Dalon said. Human Rights Watch observed that a concrete wall around
three sides of the factory had been destroyed and one factory building’s
walls badly damaged, apparently by bulldozers.

Later on January 4, at around 3 p.m., tanks opened machine
gun fire at al-Dalon’s home. He told Human Rights Watch:

My family and I were the only ones left in the
neighborhood. I wrote “Yesh mishpacha ba bait” [“there
is a family in the house,” in Hebrew] on a piece of cardboard and my wife
and daughter came out of the house holding it. But they forced us back into the
house and brought in dogs, and they stayed in the house until Wednesday
[January 7]. They threatened me that if I left the house they would shoot me
and demolish it. They put us on the ground floor, but took control of the two
upper floors. I could hear them shooting from up there. There were
literally hundreds of soldiers. There were mechanics to fix the tanks that were
in front of the house. On Wednesday at noon the soldiers left, all of them.

Israeli troops occupied and used al-Dalon’s home as a
base over the next several days, he said. They allowed him to leave the area
with his wife and five children on January 7, during the three-hour pause in
the fighting Israel announced that day. When he returned after the war,
al-Dalon found his home had been completely demolished. Human Rights
Watch observed the fragments of two anti-tank mines in the rubble of his
home.

“I built this house 10 years ago for about
50,000 Jordanian dinars [roughly $70,000],” ad-Dalon said. “I
lost everything, my house and all my furniture. I also lost my seven
cows.”

Al-Dalon said there were no Palestinian militants in the
area at the time his home was occupied or during the rest of the time he was
forced to stay there; he had not heard any reports that fighters entered the
area subsequently. “The closest area they reached during the
fighting was to the west of the al-Saraji hill,” he said, indicating a
hill roughly a kilometer to the west of the area.

Atta Abu Jubbah cement-packaging factory

The Abu Jubbah factory was located on the Eastern Line to
the northeast of Izbt Abd Rabbo (beyond the Israel-imposed buffer zone near the
de facto border, like all the other structures whose destruction Human Rights
Watch documented in this area). It was the only factory that packaged
cement powder for transshipment in Gaza.

Human Rights Watch observed a destroyed administration
building and workers’ complex, and the rubble of a very large cylindrical
metal tank where the factory stored the concrete before packaging it.[118]

Ibrahim Abu Hanna, 52, who lived next door to the factory,
said the factory was still unscathed as of January 15, two days before Israeli
troops began to withdraw. He told Human Rights Watch that he had fled his
home during the aerial campaign but came back to the area twice before the end
of the war, during the daily three-hour ceasefire periods. “I came
back five days and again three days before the end of the war [around January
12 and 15], although it was a big risk because of the drones. The factory
was still standing and had not been destroyed at that point.”[119]
On these two visits to the area, Abu Hanna said, he observed no Palestinian
fighters in or near the area, and his description of a large number of Israeli
tanks and bulldozers further to the west suggests that the IDF had established
control over the area. “The tanks were on the hill [to the west],
there were lots of tanks and many D9s [militarized bulldozers]. It seemed
each tank had two D9s with it.”

Human Rights Watch observed the remains of a very large
cement storage tank. When we visited the site in April the tank had been
partly disassembled into individual sections, some of which were punctured by
the entry and exit holes of munitions that had been fired into them. Each
of the tank’s metal support pillars had rested on one cubic meter blocks
of reinforced concrete. Mu`in Hassanein, 42, a guard at the factory who
had left the area on the fourth day of the Israeli air campaign (December 30 or
31), told Human Rights Watch that “They put a landmine next to each
support and blew them up.”[120]
Human Rights Watch observed concrete rubble consistent with this description as
well as the remains of one anti-tank mine.

Hassanein said the storage tank was shipped to Gaza in
sections from Turkey in 2003. He said that the factory received its last
shipment of powder from Israel before November 4, 2008, when Israel cut off all
imports of cement. Prior to the border closures, the factory employed up
to 40 people.

Al-Tibi cinder block and cement mixing factory

The al-Tibi cement factory was also on the Eastern Line to
the north of Izbt Abd Rabbo. In this area, “it was relatively calm
for most of the war, not like in the south,” according to Salim Dahrouj
Abu M’Hammad, 41, a factory guard.[121] “But
then they [the IDF] chose this area to withdraw from. They destroyed the
factory then during the withdrawal,” he told Human Rights Watch.

Abu M’Hammed’s home is around 300 meters from
the factory. Although it does not have a direct line of sight to the
factory, he told Human Rights Watch, “The day before the end of the war
[January 17] we could hear the sound of bulldozers in this area and saw columns
of smoke and dust, which we realized were from destruction. There were no
fighters here. At 7:30 a.m. on the next day [January 18], we heard on the radio
that they had withdrawn from Gaza.”

Human Rights Watch observed that the cinderblock factory
itself, the walls of the factory compound’s garage and warehouse, and
part of the factory’s administration building, all of which were
destroyed. Four cement-mixing trucks as well as three large metal tubs
(simple equipment used for mixing concrete) were inoperable because of damage;
one of the cement-mixing trucks was completely destroyed and the other three
had been pushed into one another and badly damaged. A cement-pumping
truck was also badly damaged.

The factory had been inoperative since November 4, 2008, due
to Israeli border closures and the ban of cement imports, Abu M’Hammad
said. At its maximum capacity, the factory produced between 850 and 1000
cubic meters of liquid concrete and 6500 cinderblocks per day, and employed a
total of 34 people.

Zeytoun

Zeytoun is an area comprising residential neighborhoods and
open agricultural lands roughly 2.5 kilometers south of Gaza City.[122]
The western boundary of Zeytoun runs south of the Gaza City suburb of Tel
el-Hawa. Its eastern edge runs parallel to the east of Salahaddin Road,
Gaza’s main north-south artery. Human Rights Watch interviewed
residents of al-Samuni Road, an east-west road in the southern part of Zeytoun,
and residents of a part of Road 10, another east-west road further to the
north. Prior to the war, residential buildings lined sections of both
roads, which link agricultural areas in Zeytoun to Salahaddin Road.

Early in the Israeli ground offensive that began on the
evening of January 3, IDF armored forces drove into Gaza south of the Karni
crossing and rapidly moved west to the sea coast near the area of the former
Netzarim settlement, effectively bisecting the territory.[123]
By the early morning of January 4, witnesses said, large numbers of Israeli
forces had advanced from their positions northward into Zeytoun. The IDF
subsequently advanced northwest towards Tel el-Hawa on January 15, badly
damaging buildings especially on the suburb’s southern edge.
Israeli forces began to withdraw from Gaza early on the morning of January 18.

Human Rights Watch observed extensive damage to homes, greenhouses,
and agricultural land in Zeytoun. In cases that Human Rights Watch examined on
al-Samuni road and Road 10 – which represent a fraction of the total
destruction in the area – residents said that at least 193 people had
lived in residential buildings that were destroyed during the war. According to
analysis by UNOSAT of satellite imagery taken of the al-Samuni Road and Road 10
area of Zeytoun during and immediately after the conflict, 114 buildings and 27
greenhouses were destroyed or severely damaged from December 27, 2008 to
January 19, 2009.[124]
On the eastern side of Salahaddin Road opposite its intersection with al-Samuni
Road, Human Rights Watch observed two destroyed factories.

The accounts of residents on both al-Samuni Road and Road 10
suggests that Israeli forces inflicted extensive damage to buildings and land
there in the early days of the ground offensive, but that they did not destroy
most houses along these two roads until after January 7, when they had already
occupied these areas and almost all residents had fled. Many of the
Zeytoun residents with whom Human Rights Watch spoke said that they left these
areas after their homes had been shelled or hit with small-arms fire. When they
returned to the areas after the war, they said, they found the buildings had
been bulldozed or destroyed with anti-tank mines. Human Rights Watch also
observed bulldozer tracks in destroyed agricultural areas.

UNOSAT analysis of satellite imagery found that 43 percent
of the buildings and greenhouses in the al-Samuni and Road 10 area were
destroyed during the last two days of the war, after six days of relatively
little destruction. According to UNOSAT, 60 buildings and 16 greenhouses
were damaged or destroyed between December 27 and January 10, but only four
buildings and one greenhouse from January 10 to 16. The amount of
destruction increased again significantly from January 16 to 19, when 50
buildings and 10 greenhouses were destroyed or severely damaged. Israel
withdrew its ground forces from Gaza early in the morning on January 18.

Reports by the Palestinian Center for Human Rights (PCHR), a
non-governmental organization based in Gaza, and by the Israeli NGO
B’Tselem, indicate that 34 alleged militants were killed in the Zeytoun
area from December 27, 2008 to January 14, 2009.[125]
According to PCHR and B’Tselem, no fighters were killed in all of Zeytoun
after January 14.[126]
As noted, satellite imagery shows that almost half the destruction in the
al-Samuni and Road 10 areas of Zeytoun occurred after January 16.

According to PCHR researchers, the members of Palestinian
armed groups killed in Zeytoun were not killed in areas around al-Samuni road
and Road 10.[127]
PCHR and B’Tselem did not provide specific locations for the
militants’ deaths, and Human Rights Watch could not independently confirm
the dates, locations or circumstances of the fighters’ deaths.[128]
The most densely built-up areas of Zeytoun lie between 500 meters and 1
kilometer north and northeast of Road 10; by contrast, both al-Samuni Road and
Road 10 are surrounded by open agricultural areas. As discussed below,
Palestinian witnesses said the IDF came under mortar fire from fighters to the
north during the first days of the incursion, when Israeli forces drove into
Zeytoun from the south, and one resident said that clashes between the IDF and
Palestinian troops occurred in built-up areas in northeastern Zeytoun. Fighters
in southern Tel el-Hawa reportedly also put up resistance to the IDF drive
further north on January 15.

The accounts of residents, the IDF’s advance from
Zeytoun to Tel el-Hawa, and other evidence indicates that the IDF maintained
control of the areas on al-Samuni Road and Road 10 from approximately January 5
or 6 onwards. The IDF’s widespread destruction of property in these areas
at and after this time would thus be unlikely to meet the requirement of
imperative military necessity. As is discussed in detail below, in many
cases, buildings were destroyed during a period when residents left the area
and before they returned after Israel withdrew its forces; however, the type
and significant extent of the destruction in the areas we investigated is not
consistent with attacks against individual military objects or with damage
sustained during fighting.

Eastern al-Samuni Road
(al-Samuni family)

The extended al-Samuni family lived in the southeastern part
of the agricultural area of Zeytoun. Israeli forces bombarded the area
intensively on the night of Saturday, January 3, the first day of the ground
invasion, and continued to do so early the next morning.[129]
Residents who lived further to the west on the same street as the al-Samuni
family, said that Palestinian fighters to the north fired mortar rounds towards
Israeli positions on the night of January 3.[130]

The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict found that
Palestinian combatants may have been present in the al-Samuni neighborhood on
January 3, based on a witness’s statement that he heard shots near his
house that night and “at first thought it was Palestinian
fighters,” and on a report by Al Mezan, a Palestinian NGO, which stated
that an Islamic Jihad fighter was killed in the area at around midnight.[131]
The Fact Finding Mission found, however, that “already before daybreak on
4 January 2009 the Israeli armed forces were in full control of the al-Samouni
neighbourhood.”

On the morning of January 4, Israeli forces attacked the
al-Samuni area, ordered residents to evacuate some buildings, and occupied
buildings, without facing opposition by Palestinian fighters, according to
residents.

Residents said the IDF attacked the al-Samuni area early in
the morning. Helmi al-Samuni, who lived on the third floor of a large building
on the north side of the street, told Human Rights Watch that he was inside his
apartment when a shell came through his window from the north-east and
completely destroyed the furnishings of the room where it entered.

Human Rights Watch observed a hole in the eastern wall of
al-Samuni’s home, which he said was caused by a second shell that hit and
exploded.[132]
He and his family fled their apartment and eventually sought shelter in a
building belonging to his relative Wa’el al-Samuni, on the south side of
the street. He did not see any Palestinian fighters in the area at the time.
Nafez al-Samuni told Human Rights Watch that he and his family also sought
shelter at Wa’el al-Samuni’s property, after two shells hit their
home that morning. He was not aware of any Palestinian fighters in the
immediate area at the time.[133]

Israeli troops ordered many residents to leave their homes
along al-Samuni Road.[134]
In other cases, Israeli forces occupied buildings and ordered residents to
remain in their homes. According to Muhammad al-Samuni, who lived near
the eastern edge of the area, IDF forces entered his building from the roof and
the front door simultaneously at 5 a.m. on January 4, and detained the
residents for four days.[135]

Although Human Rights Watch is not aware of any claims that
any members of the al-Samuni family engaged in combat with the IDF, it is
possible some had active affiliations with militant groups. Muhammad
al-Samuni displayed an al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades training certificate he
received in 2000.

Israeli forces continued to exert control over the area the
next day, according to residents. By the early morning of January 5,
approximately 90 to 100 family members had taken shelter in a warehouse owned
by Wa’el al-Samuni, in some cases after Israeli soldiers ordered them to
do so. At 6 a.m. on January 5 a group of four or five men tried to leave
the building and were struck by a shell.[136] Thereafter at
least two shells struck the building, killing at least 21 members of the family
taking shelter there.[137]
It is not clear what prompted the attack. According to Maysa al-Samuni,
“it was quiet in the area” when the attack on Wa’el
al-Samuni’s warehouse began. Israeli soldiers already occupied many
houses in the area, she said, and subsequently performed first aid on her
injured daughter after the two fled Wa’el’s building.[138]
According to Nafez al-Samuni, the attack “killed about 20 of us”
and wounded him and his son Ahmed, but Israeli troops prevented survivors from
fleeing. “I stayed there for days with no food or water, wounded in
my left leg. Ahmed was wounded in his chest.”[139]

Many surviving residents of the al-Samuni area fled Zeytoun
later on January 5. At that time, they said, Israeli shelling had damaged
buildings in the area but most were still standing. Saleh al-Samuni, 52, told
Human Rights Watch that when he left the area on January 5, “all the houses
were still here. […] When we got back, it was all gone.”[140]
Helmi al-Samuni told Human Rights Watch that when he tried to leave on January
5, raising a white flag, “none of these houses were destroyed yet, apart
from the shells that had hit.”[141]

Human Rights Watch was unable to determine whether
Palestinian fighters attempted to enter the al-Samuni area of Zeytoun after
Israeli troops established control of many houses there by January 4 and
5.

On the afternoon of January 7, Israeli forces granted the
outstanding request of the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) to
access the area.[142]
Medics evacuated 18 wounded civilians and another 12 “extremely
exhausted” civilians who had been trapped in houses without food and
water since January 4. The ICRC criticized Israeli forces for failing to
coordinate medical assistance because Israeli soldiers were stationed within
around 50 meters from the buildings with the trapped civilians, which indicates
that Israeli forces were in control of the area at the time. The Israeli
army’s subsequent advance from Zeytoun northwest to Tel el-Hawa, a suburb
of Gaza City that came under sustained IDF attacks beginning on around January
15, also suggests that Israeli troops maintained control of the Zeytoun area.[143]

On January 18, within hours after Israel declared a
unilateral ceasefire, Amnesty International reported that it visited the house
where the ICRC medics had found many of the wounded and the dead but discovered
it “had been bulldozed on top of the bodies.”[144]
The building was unrecognizable when Human Rights Watch visited the area again
in April.

Human Rights Watch separately interviewed several members of
the al-Samuni family in order to establish the extent and timing of the
destruction of many of their homes and agricultural lands in the area. In
the areas to the immediate north and south of the street, members of the
al-Samuni family said, Israeli forces destroyed 17 residential buildings, two
chicken farms, olive, lemon and apple groves, and a water well belonging to the
family.[145]
In addition, according to The Independent newspaper, Israeli bulldozers
had flattened 14 smaller homes in the eastern part of the neighborhood after
they had been cleared of their occupants, and destroyed 48 dunams (4.8 hectares)
of the al-Samuni family’s agricultural land.[146]
The residents whose homes were not destroyed found them “ransacked and
scarcely habitable.” For instance, The Independent reported
finding, in the home of Musa al-Samuni, “furnishing and electrical appliances
tossed out of the window, gaping holes in the wall made for firing positions,
furniture smashed, clothes piled on the floor, pages of family Korans torn out
and remains of soldiers' rations littered in many rooms.”[147]

Western al-Samuni Road
(Silmi and Ayad families)

Approximately 450 meters west of Salahaddin Street,
al-Samuni Road intersects with a dirt track leading north towards Road 10 (an
east-west road). Residents of the area described a pattern of events very
similar to the IDF’s occupation of the al-Samuni area: the initial
assault by Israeli forces on January 3, which met with some Palestinian
resistance from the north, after which the IDF established control over the
area within a matter of days and evicted most residents by January 7 or 8.
When those residents left the area, most of their homes were still standing;
when they returned 10 or 11 days later, most had been destroyed.

On the northeast side of the small intersection of al-Samuni
Road and the dirt track leading north, Human Rights Watch observed the
destroyed two-story concrete home of Abdallah Muhammad Silmi, 45, a taxi driver.[148]
Eight members of his extended family shared the house.

Silmi told Human Rights Watch that on the night of January
3, IDF troops occupied the houses of Ra’afat Ayad, to the south, and
Rashad al-Samuni to the east. His own home immediately came under large
and small caliber sniper fire from those houses, which pinned him down –
“I spent three days near water bottles, but I couldn’t get to
them”– until around 11 a.m. on January 5.

Then they fired a tank shell that hit the stairway and
living room, and three minutes later they fired another one three meters away
from the first one and destroyed the kitchen. I was on the second floor and
tried to go down to the ground but the stairway was cut. My sons climbed down
and I handed down my daughters. Suddenly there were many infantry soldiers
around my gate who ordered us to come out. They told me, “Go to
Egypt.”[149]

Human Rights Watch separately interviewed Abdallah’s
son Freih, 21, who gave a similar account. Freih added that, after being
evicted, his family spent several hours in the home of Madhat Ayad, across the
street to the south, before both families left the area together on January 5,
walking south.[150]
Freih Silmi said there had been no Palestinian fighters in the area, and that
he saw none to the south when the group walked past Netzarim and through
Mughraqa village.

Although tank shells had already struck their home before
they left, Abdallah and Freid said the building was still sound and standing
when they fled the area. When Abdallah Silmi returned to the area 16 days
later, on January 21, he found his house demolished, along with his 1995
Mercedes car. He said that he searched the rubble but could not find $4000,
2000 Israeli shekels, and some jewelry. It was not clear how the
home had been destroyed or who stole the money. Silmi said he believed two
missiles had entered through the roof – “a whole support pillar was
just torn apart.”[151]

Human Rights Watch observed a 50-meter-wide swath of dirt
cut through the middle of a fruit tree orchard, which Silmi said had destroyed
18 dunams planted with lemon and olive trees belonging to the Silmi family, as
well as four large greenhouses. Bulldozer track marks were still visible
in some places when Human Rights Watch visited the area in April.

According to Abdallah, Palestinian fighters somewhere to the
north fired six mortar rounds at IDF troops in the area on January 3, the first
day of the ground invasion, but that there was no further or nearer armed
resistance. Because IDF troops had already occupied nearby houses with
direct lines of fire into Abdallah’s building, it appears highly unlikely
that Palestinian fighters could have subsequently occupied or otherwise used
his home in such a way that would explain and justify Israeli forces’
destruction of it.

Another area resident, Abd al-Karim Razzaq Ayad, 23, told
Human Rights Watch that prior to January 5, when he left the area, “there
was no resistance around here, or to the south or west,” although he said
relatives several hundred meters to the northeast told him they had seen
Palestinian fighters near a car dealership there.[152]

M’Baker Amin Mahmoud Ayad, 36, Abdallah’s
neighbor to the east whom Human Rights Watchinterviewed separately,
also said that during the beginning of the ground invasion (possibly January 3
and 4, although he could not give a precise date), Palestinian fighters fired
mortars at tanks in the area from the north, “but the mortars fell short
and landed on the house directly east of mine. The firing was coming from
behind the houses directly to the north, beyond the next road.”[153]
M’Baker said his house had been badly damaged during the war, and he
showed Human Rights Watch fragments of a missile he found on his roof.[154]
“They also crushed my car,” he said of Israeli forces, “a
1983 Audi I had bought just one week before.”

Immediately to the south of Abdallah Silmi’s home,
Israeli forces destroyed the home of Madhat Khalil Ayad, a 31-year-old
farmer. He shared his house with his wife and eight children, the
youngest born 10 days before the war started. Madhat said that he had not
realized that Israeli forces had invaded the area when, at 7 a.m. on January 4,
his brother Ra’afat shouted to him that Atiyya al-Samuni’s home was
on fire. “So I went to put the fire out, but on the way I saw a soldier
in a house wearing a big camouflage helmet, who shot at me but missed.”[155]
Israeli forces reached the area of the brothers’ homes at 9 a.m. Like
Abdallah Silmi, Mahdat told Human Rights Watch that Abdallah’s home came
under sniper fire from Israeli troops in the surrounding houses for several
days. According to Madhat, after Israeli troops forced Abdallah and his
family from their home on January 5, the Ayad and Silmi families also left the
area together, in a group of 34, walking south past the abandoned Israeli
settlement of Neztarim to the Nuseirat refugee camp.

Jawad Ayad, 36, lived directly to the east of Madhat.
He told Human Rights Watch that after snipers and soldiers who had occupied two
neighboring houses shot repeatedly at his windows, pinning him and his family
down even when they tried to go to the bathroom, he was forced out of his home
on January 6, when two tanks drove up to the house and pointed their guns
directly at it. “One of the men in the tank that came from the
north gestured for us to go west, but the guy in the other tank told us to go
east,” Jawad recalled.[156]
“I went west. I saw my uncle, Abd Jumaa Ayad, lying dead on his
face in the dirt road.” Two of the Ayad family’s homes,
including Madhat’s, had been destroyed by that point, along with their
greenhouses, Jawad said. Madhat Abu Ghranima, who lived roughly 150
meters west of the Ayads’ property, told Human Rights Watch that on
January 7 he saw a tank drive in from the northeast and destroy the home of Abd
Jumaa Ayad, which was to the southwest of the rest of the Ayad family’s
property.[157]
Both Jawad Ayad and Madhat Abu Ghranima said the rest of the Ayads’ homes
were still standing at that point. The Abu Ghranima family left the area on
January 8 driving to the southwest, “since on Tuesday [January 6] we
heard on the radio that the al-Samunis [to the east] had been killed.”[158]

Jawad Ayad said no Palestinian fighters were active on or
near his property before he left on January 7. After heading west, Ayad,
who was walking with his pregnant wife and six children, turned north.
“I didn’t see any [Palestinian] fighters there” either, he said.[159]
“They might have been too afraid to carry their weapons, because of the
[Israeli aerial] drones, but they would have been wearing masks and we
didn’t see anyone masked,” he said.

Human Rights Watch interviewed numerous residents of the
area, including Abd al-Karim Razzaq Ayad and Jawad Ayad, who said that Israeli
forces destroyed eight homes owned by the Ayad family and three others
belonging to the Lulu, Ashur, and Sahiur families, in a small area at the
southwest end of al-Samuni Road. They listed the residents of each home:
the Israeli forces’ destruction of all but one of the homes in the area
left 49 people homeless.[160]
The Ayad family also lost six greenhouses and a grove of guava and peach trees;
to the east, they said, were razed lemon and olive groves belonging to the Hejji
family and a bulldozed wheat field owned by the al-Samunis.

Road 10 area

A few hundred meters north of the Samuni and Ayad
families’ property in the Zeytoun area is the east-west road called Road
10, which intersects in the east with Salahaddin Road. Residents of the
Road 10 area corroborated accounts that invading Israeli forces attacked the
areas around al-Samuni Road beginning on January 3, and had taken control of
Salahaddin Road. According to witnesses, IDF tanks entered the Road 10
area from the east and from the south on the morning of January 4. In a
small area of Road 10, Human Rights Watch documented the destruction of seven
homes where 45 people had lived before the fighting.[161]
We did not document, but observed, many other destroyed homes along the road.

Rajab Abid Ishtweiwi, 57, lived near Road 10 on land that,
he told Human Rights Watch, his family has owned land since the Ottoman period.[162]
He spent the first eight days of the war in his home, and saw large explosions
at the municipal abattoir a half-kilometer to the west, on Salahaddin Street,
and another on his farmland 100 meters to the south. Israeli ground forces
entered Zeytoun around an hour before sunset on January 3, said Ishteiwi.

The tanks were shelling intensively from east to west. They
fired a shell every hundred meters. But the real war started on Sunday [January
4] at 8 a.m. The forces took control of the areas east of Salahaddin and dozens
of tanks and huge bulldozers began to move west down 10th
Street. The bulldozers dug holes and tanks positioned themselves in them.[163]

Ishteiwi said tanks shelled the mosque and several houses,
which soldiers then occupied – the soldiers “had branches stuck to
them and were wearing special large cloths over their helmets.”

Sufian Muhammad Silmi, 48, a carpenter whose home still
stands near Ishteiwi’s house, told Human Rights Watch that he first saw
IDF tanks enter the Road 10 area at 9 a.m. on January 4, from the al-Samuni
Road area to the south-east. The tanks fired at his cousin Talaat’s
home directly to the east of his own, Silmi said, “and Talaat and his
family came to my house. There were 30 of us sheltering here.”[164]

Human Rights Watch separately interviewed Sufian’s
cousin, Talaat Ahmad Silmi, 45, who works in Gaza’s central blood
bank. The east and south sides of Talaat’s home face open
agricultural areas, and he showed Human Rights Watch the damage caused by what
he said were four tank shells, fired from those directions, that hit his home
within minutes of one another at around 9:30 a.m. on January 4. The
shells destroyed, along with other furniture and structural damage, his
refrigerator, microwave, gas range, washing machine, and water tanks. He
fled with his family to Sufian’s home, and watched as soldiers quickly
occupied his own. Human Rights Watch observed that apparently all of Talaat
Silmi’s furniture had been smashed. Talaat Silmi said he was in his
home at the time the IDF attacked it, and said there were no Palestinian
militants in the house and no fire directed against Israeli forces from near
the house.[165]

IDF forces quickly seized control of the area, according to
Sufian Silmi, and kept his extended family pinned down in his home by
“firing gunshots at us. The soldiers kept us here until Tuesday [January
6] at 11 a.m., but then we fled waving white flags, and went to Zeytoun town
[to the north].” He pointed at the damage to his home evidently caused by
a tank shell fired from the east, which he said hit the house after he left.

According to Rajab Ishteiwi, 110 residents of the area were
trapped in their homes, including 32 people in his home, for 12 days, until the
ICRC came and evacuated around 20 women, children, and elderly. He
believes the evacuation, which was not able to evacuate him and a large group
of other residents, occurred on around January 14. After the evacuation, two
tanks positioned on a hill near a water tank, to the southwest, began shelling
the houses in the area. “We decided then it would be better to die
in the open than in the rubble,” Ishteiwi said, and the rest of the group
walked west to Salahaddin road and then to Gaza City.[166]

Despite the damage by tank shells and small-arms fire, none
of the Ishteiwi family’s homes had been completely destroyed at that
point, although the home of a certain Nasser Ayad had already been mined and
demolished. Said Ishteiwi:

We spent three days in Gaza City before we came back, and
the whole area had been destroyed, most by bulldozers. Six homes belonging to
my family were completely gone, another seven were damaged. We used to
grow figs, grapes, apricots, citrus and olives, and 40 of the 80 dunams [4 of 8
hectares] we own were razed.

Rajab Ishteiwi and other residents identified, and Human
Rights Watch examined, the rubble of seven homes that were totally destroyed
and one that was damaged, in a small area along Road 10 and to the south
towards Samuni Road. Five of the homes belonged to members of the
Ishteiwi family. The destruction left around 45 people homeless.[167]

Talaat Silmi described the destruction he saw when he
returned after the war:

There was a [water] tank right outside here [the eastern
wall of his home]. This was a wheat field, but these mounds here now are all
from bulldozers. We had 18 dunams [1.8 hectares] of land here that was all
razed, and another 22 dunams [2.2 hectares] around the al-Samuni area south of
here. We also had a house down there, where we stayed when we were farming
there, that was totally destroyed, and two of our water wells were demolished.[168]

According to Sufian Silmi, Israeli soldiers occupied his
house and destroyed most of the furniture. Human Rights Watch observed small
holes punched through the exterior walls near the floor in several second-story
rooms, which were consistent with IDF “sniper holes,” indicating
that the IDF had occupied and used the house as a firing position. Along
with other damage, there were dozens of bullet holes apparently fired point
blank into Silmi’s clothes cupboards. Silmi said that he returned after
the ceasefire to find 10 of his goats died because of lack of food and water.

Factories East of Salahaddin Road

Human Rights Watch visited two destroyed industrial
establishments in the otherwise open areas on the eastern side of Salahaddin
Street, opposite the Samuni area of Zeytoun.

Hamdan Abu Oreiban, 70, was a guard at the Engineering
Company for Concrete and Construction Materials, a cement mixing and
cinderblock factory.[169]
He said he was trapped at the factory during the first weeks of the conflict,
because ongoing shelling and firing by IDF troops made him too fearful to
leave. “The forces were already in the Samuni area, and there were
tanks and bulldozers were also to the south of here,” Abu Oreiban said,
“and they had occupied all the houses along [Salahaddin] street. There
was one house from where they were shooting at the windows of the
factory.” On January 8, Abu Oreiban saw an ICRC convoy on Salahaddin
Road, which had been called in to evacuate other residents, including the body
of a boy, Brahim Juha, who had been killed. “When I saw the ICRC I
waved a white flag and ran,” he said.[170]

According to Abu Oreiban, the factory had not been damaged
at the time he escaped, apart from suffering small-arms fire. When he returned
on January 18, he said, virtually all of the cement plant’s vehicles had
been knocked over and partly or completely crushed. Human Rights Watch
observed the following vehicles, all of which were destroyed or so badly
damaged as to be beyond repair: one dump truck, nine cement mixers, three cement
pump trucks with cranes, a bulldozer, a small bulldozer, and a car.
“The car was mine, a 1983 Subaru,” Abu Oreiban said. The
character of the destruction and large treadmarks on the ground suggested that
militarized bulldozers had done the damage.

Abu Oreiban said that no militants were present in or near
the factory during the time he was trapped there. It appears doubtful
that militants could have occupied it after he left, because the IDF controlled
all the houses along Salahaddin Road, which had clear lines of fire at the
factory buildings from the west, and because the open fields to the east of the
factory would have afforded militants no cover from Israeli tanks and aircraft.

The factory’s buildings and equipment had also been
damaged. Hafez Kishku, 47, the cement plant manager, told Human Rights
Watch that the control room and gravel conveyor belt were destroyed, and that
the administration building had been damaged by a bulldozer. Human Rights Watch
also observed that the plant’s one metal silo, for storing concrete, had
been badly damaged by a shell that entered from the north east.
Immediately to the south of the cement plant was a smaller factory that
produced silicate paving stones and cinderblocks, which was also damaged.

Kishku told Human Rights Watch that the cement plant was
operating until July 2007, with almost 30 workers. “All our equipment was
second hand, but a second-hand cement pumping truck here costs $300,000,”
he said.[171]
Kishku said that apart from a payment of $7,000 from Gaza’s Ministry of
Economy, the factory had received no assistance. The plant had not been
operating for some time due to Israel’s border closures and ban on cement
imports. The silicate and cinderblock factory next door shut down five months
ago, he said, due to the border closures.

To the southeast of the cement plant, in an open area, Human
Rights Watch saw the completely flattened remains of a factory owned by Wassim
al-Khozanada.[172]
Nur al-Tarabin, 39, a guard at the factory, said it produced a wide range of
appliances and electrical products, including water heaters, circuit boards,
fluorescent lights, and electric plugs. “Because we recycled a lot from
old electrical transformers, we didn’t need imports,” he said.
“Forty people were working here just before the war.”
According to at-Tarabin, the factory was built in 2000 and demolished during an
Israeli incursion in 2003. “We rebuilt it in 2005 after the
disengagement,” he said.[173]

Al-Tarabin said the factory had been bulldozed, which was
consistent with the completely flattened nature of the debris. “We
didn’t find any shrapnel or mines here.” Al-Tarabin said he fled
his home, near the factory, at 8 p.m. on the first day of the ground invasion,
January 3. He said he saw infantry and tanks coming from the east.
“The tanks came south, parallel to the Eastern Road, from the north east,
then turned west. Their base was just south of here.” He did not
witness the destruction of the factory, but his father, who lived in an elevated
area to the east, in the village of Juhr al-Dik, did.

Human Rights Watch later separately interviewed Nur’s
father, Hassan al-Tarabin, 73, at his home in Juhr al-Dik, several hundred
meters to the east. On January 6, he said, “I looked out and saw the
bulldozer standing on the factory.”[174] According
to Hassan al-Tarabin and his employee Majdi Aid al-Swerki, 19, Israeli forces
destroyed homes to the north of Juhr al-Dik on their drive to the west early
during the invasion. Other homes, lying closer to the border to the east,
were demolished later, towards the end of the operation. Hassan
al-Tarabin’s home, in the southern part of the Juhr al-Dik area, was shot
at during the conflict, and he said his cow and five of his goats were shot and
killed. Human Rights Watch saw a bandaged camel that Hassan al-Tarabin said had
been shot in the stomach but survived. Al-Tarabin’s home was not
occupied, and he stayed there for the duration of the war.

Al-Tarabin was unaware of any fighters in his area or in the
direction or area of the factory, he said. Due to the location of his house it
is possible that militants were present in other parts of Juhr al-Dik without
his being able to see them.

Western Beit Lahiya

Human Rights Watch investigated several places where Israeli
forces destroyed civilian property in an area in western Beit Lahiya
comprising residential buildings, some industrial establishments, and open areas used for
agriculture, roughly 4 kilometers north of downtown Gaza City.

Israeli forces heavily bombarded the area and drove across
the 1949 armistice line into northwestern Gaza early in the ground offensive,
according to residents living just
north of the Sudaniyya road,
about five kilometers south of the border.[175]
Residents reported hearing or seeing exchanges of fire between Israeli troops
and Palestinian fighters, and some had seen fighters in the elevated, built-up
area along a road that connects the Sudaniyya road with the al-Atatra neighborhood around
one kilometer to the north. However, much of the destruction occurred in
the lower-lying, relatively open areas to the west where, residents said, no
armed groups were present. IDF tanks and armored bulldozers advanced into
these lower areas over a period of several days, followed by infantry
units.

Witnesses who remained in the area until January 13 or 14
reported that it was virtually deserted apart from the presence of IDF armored
vehicles, troops and aircraft, and that many homes were still standing.
When these witnesses returned after the war, they found numerous homes had been
destroyed. As is discussed below, while some buildings were destroyed
during a period when residents left the area and before they returned after
Israel withdrew its forces, the nature and extent of the destruction in these areas
are not consistent with attacks against individual military objects or with
damage sustained during fighting.

Human Rights Watch documented the destruction of 38
residential buildings in these areas; we did not establish the total number of
people displaced, but 11 of these structures had housed 106 people before the
war. When Human Rights Watch conducted our research in April, a tent camp
had been set up in the middle of the area; the camp manager said it housed 65
families whose homes had been destroyed or rendered uninhabitable during the
war.[176]
The families said they were unable to rebuild their homes due to Israel’s
restrictions on imports of construction materials.

Badr flour mill

At the northwest corner of an intersection with Sudaniyya road, which runs
east-west, lies the Badr Flour Mill, a five-story wheat-processing facility,
surrounded to the south and east by other factories and the homes of some of
the partners in the mill.[177]
A wall encloses the grounds
of the mill. Ahmad Hassan Abd Rabbo, 65, a guard at the factory, said he was
present when the IDF shelled the factory early in the morning on January 10.

Around 4
a.m. Saturday I was here sheltering in the guard house and I could hear the
helicopter hovering very close for about an hour. It fired on the mill, there
was a lot of other shelling too, but I couldn’t specify what hit the
mill. The attacks that night went on for two and a half hours. After that the
mill was burning and the firefighters came to put it out.[178]

Abd Rabbo pointed out that the factory was badly damaged
whereas smaller factories (for canned goods and for diapers) immediately to the
west of it were not attacked. He could not explain why the IDF targeted
the flour mill. He said he had not seen any fighters on the property prior to
the attacks.

Fadiyya Hammad al-Rumailat, 66, lives in a residence by
the beach, about 75 meters west of the mill. She told Human Rights Watch
that the civil defense took
her and her daughter with them when they left after fighting the fire at the mill.
“Then the next day [January 11] I came back to feed my goats, left again,
and I tried to come back the following day but I couldn’t because there
were many tanks here and a lot of shooting. Later I saw from the tracks
that a tank came and destroyed a truck and a diesel tanker here.”[179]
Fadiyya al-Rumailat corroborated Abd Rabbo’s statement that the IDF had
shelled the area with white phosphorus, saying that some burning pieces had
landed in her yard and that she had covered them with sand.

Hamdan Hamada, a 52-year-old partner in the mill, told Human
Rights Watch that he had left the area on January 4, but showed researchers
damage and large amounts of shrapnel, and a hand-written note stating that a
de-mining team had defused an unexploded aerial bomb, apparently written by the
team’s interpreter. The UN Mine Action Team in Gaza City later
confirmed to Human Rights Watch that the front half of a 500-pound Mk82 aerial
bomb had been identified on an upper floor in a narrow walkway between burnt-out
machinery and an outside wall on January 25 and defused on February 11, 2009.[180]
The Hamada family later provided Human Rights Watch with video showing the bomb
as well as damage to the mill.[181]
Hamada also showed Human Rights Watch scores of 40 mm shell casings marked HEDP (high-explosive dual purpose) that he said were found at
the factory.[182]
He said that after receiving a call about the attacks and learning that the
factory was on fire, “[w]e called the civil defense, and they tried to
call the ICRC for liaison with the IDF to come and put out the fire, but they
couldn’t get here until 10 a.m.”[183]

The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict examined
the mill and concluded that the mill “was hit by an air strike” at
3 or 4 a.m. on January 9, after the mill was also “hit several
times” by missiles fired from a helicopter.[184]

The IDF stated that it had conducted an operational
debriefing into the incident and rejected the Fact Finding Mission’s
conclusion that the mill was attacked from the air.[185]
The IDF claimed that although the flour mill was a “‘strategic high
point’ in the area, due to its height and clear line of sight,” the
IDF “decided not to preemptively attack the flour mill, in order to
prevent damage to civilian infrastructure as much as possible.”[186]
During a ground operation on January 9, however, “IDF troops came under
intense fire from different Hamas positions in the vicinity of the flour mill.
The IDF forces fired back towards the sources of fire and threatening
locations. As the IDF returned fire, the upper floor of the flour mill was hit
by tank shells.”[187]
The IDF probe relied in part on aerial “[p]hotographs of the mill
following the incident,” which it stated “do not show structural
damage consistent with an air attack.”

On February 1, the Guardian reported that the UN had
earlier found and defused an aerial bomb at the mill.[188]
At a meeting on February 4, 2010, lawyers with the Military Advocate
General’s office told Human Rights Watch that they were aware of reports
that an aerial bomb had struck the mill during the attack, and said it was
possible that the operational debriefing might be reopened to take this
evidence into consideration.[189]

The IDF supported its conclusion that the attack on the mill
was justified by stating that “200 meters south of the flour mill an IDF
squad was ambushed by five Hamas operatives in a booby-trapped house; 500
meters east of the flour mill another squad engaged enemy forces in a house
that was also used for weapons storage; and adjacent to the flour mill, two booby-trapped
houses exploded.” The presence of Hamas fighters 500 or 200 meters away
from the flour mill, or the placement of booby-traps in nearby houses, would
not in themselves justify attacks directed against the mill. Human Rights Watch
did not identify “exploded” houses adjacent to the mill during a
visit to the area, but did observe significant damage to an apartment building
and a private home in the mill’s vicinity. The apartment building
was damaged, apparently by tank fire, and the private building had been partly
demolished by a tracked vehicle.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence that Palestinian armed
groups were present in or near the flour mill. According to one witness,
two members of Hamas were killed by Israeli shells or missiles in an area
roughly 250 to 300 meters east of the flour mill in attacks on January 4 and
January 7. Hashem
al-Asali, 23, told Human Rights Watch that a drone attack killed his brother, Suhail, 24, at
around 7:20 a.m. on January 4.[190]
Hashem said he returned to the area with a group of around 15 other residents
on January 7, after Israel announced a three-hour lull in the fighting, when a
shell struck and killed his other brother Jihad al-Asali, 22, also a Hamas
member.

The mill was the second largest of Gaza’s five flour
mills, Hamada said, capable of processing 200 tons of wheat per day. The
IDF attacks had destroyed specialized semolina milling machines, installed by a team of
Turkish engineers, as well as other machinery, and rendered the mill
inoperable. “We need engineers,” he said. “The most
important thing now is a green light from the Israelis to get experts in
here.” Hamada gave Human Rights Watch a copy of a damage estimate
stating that machinery losses alone amounted to $1,495,000.

Juma’a Family Houses

Further to the east along Sudaniyya road from the Badr flour mill, members of the
extended Juma’a family lived in nine residential buildings on one block
facing a small road leading north.[191]
Of the nine residential buildings on the Juma’a family’s block,
each of which housed up to four families, seven were completely destroyed and
two partly destroyed by Israeli forces in January, leaving at least 71 people
homeless.[192]Between some of the houses was a small olive grove that had been razed by
IDF bulldozers. Residents said that some of the trees were 40-years old.[193]

Residents from the block and surrounding areas said the
destruction occurred between January 14 and 18, after the IDF had taken control
of the area. When members of the extended Juma’a family returned on
January 18, they found that most of their homes had been completely destroyed.

When Human Rights Watch visited the block in April, tread
marks consistent with bulldozers were still visible, and ramp-shaped piles of
sand and debris with tread marks on them surrounded many of the destroyed
buildings on the block. Human Rights Watch did not observe any exploded
or unexploded anti-tank mines but, according to resident Ala’a Juma’a, “the IDF left three
anti-tank mines on the top two floors of the big house [formerly occupied by
Muhammad, Osama, Hani and Nasser Juma’a and their families]. I was here
the first day after the war and a mine went off at 10 p.m. that day, another
one at 11:30 p.m. and a third one at 2 a.m.”

According to Hassan Ahmad Juma’a, some destruction of
agricultural land was the result of IDF shelling with white phosphorus.
“That is what burned all the trees on that block of houses – they
used lots and lots of white phosphorus here.”[194]
Human Rights Watch observed numerous burn marks on buildings but residents said
Hamas authorities had already collected shells and shrapnel from the area,
possibly in an effort to collect and re-use explosive or other materials in its
own weapons.

Mahmoud al-Ajrami, a former assistant secretary of foreign affairs with the
Palestinian Authority, lived in an ornate,
three-story home roughly 450 meters north of the Juma’a family
block. His experiences during the war led him to pass by the Juma’a
block on January 13 as he fled the area.

Al-Ajrami said his own home came under small-arms fire from
Israeli troops to the north east, and from Israeli helicopter cannons fired on
January 6 and 7. The IDF intensified its attacks on the area near
al-Ajrami’s home early in the morning on January 8, he said, and his wife
and daughter suffered shrapnel injuries on January 9 and 10. “There
were tanks to the northeast, the north, the northwest, and to the west along
the coast,” al-Ajrami said. His daughter left to the south after she was
wounded, but he and his wife stayed behind.

On January 11, at around 1 a.m., al-Ajrami said, IDF troops
wearing flashlights on their helmets blew up a gate in the perimeter wall
around his property and stormed
his home. Al-Ajrami said the soldiers put plastic handcuffs on him and
blindfolded him, took him outside, led him up to the second floor of his
neighbor’s home, and ordered him to walk, causing him to fall off his
neighbor’s balcony. He broke several ribs from the fall, he said.
Israeli troops then forced him and a neighbor to walk to an area near the
former Israeli settlement of Dugit, about 1.5 kilometers to the north. His wife
was not allowed to accompany them. “They kept me outside in a military
position with the walls created from earth by bulldozers. I could see that
there were lots of tanks and APCs
from under my blindfold,” al-Ajrami said. He was interrogated three
times, then released on January 13 or 14 and ordered to walk south.

I walked for one and a half hours, very slowly, until I
came back to my house. I stumbled into Israeli soldiers twice on the way.
They were extremely surprised to see me. No one else was around but
soldiers. I got back and saw my car [an SUV] was flattened, and the gates were destroyed.
They had killed my dog. My wife had gone, but she told me later that they
had attacked our house at around 8:30 or 9 a.m. on the 11th, just after they
demolished our cousin’s house with bulldozers [which was catty-corner across
the street].

Human Rights Watch inspected al-Ajrami’s ornate, three-story home,
which he said he had occupied for seven years. The structure was severely
damaged by small arms fire and tank shells. Al-Ajrami showed researchers
multiple 20 millimeter shells marked “HEDP” (high explosive dual
purpose), likely fired from attack helicopters, the tail-fins of a 120 mm mortar, and other munitions that
he said he had collected from inside the house.[195]
Al-Ajrami also found small, hand-written notes, in Hebrew, addressed to the
“202nd Unit,” which Israeli soldiers had left behind.
The notes seem to have accompanied food or other gifts sent by Israelis to the
troops in Gaza.[196]

In the afternoon of the day he was released, January 13 or
14, al-Ajrami walked southeast to the Kamal Adwan neighborhood. On his
way he passed by the block of nine houses owned by members of the Juma’a
family (see below) which were then standing. The entire area was empty of
residents at this point, al-Ajrami said. By the time the war ended,
four or five days later, most of the Juma’a family’s houses were
completely destroyed.

Al-Ajrami said he did not see evidence that Palestinian
fighters were present near his home prior to his forced eviction or in any of
the areas he passed through while fleeing the area.

There was no fighting [by Palestinians] here. Before the
war, the resistance used to fire rockets [at Israel] from groves by the sea,
and in open areas to the northwest, but during the war the resistance was
around 250 meters to the east, along the [north-south] road. I witnessed
exchanges of fire to the east, not here. But the IDF mostly used F-16s in
that area. The infantry didn’t enter that area, the APC’s [armored
personnel carriers] were closer to me. Really the IDF [ground
forces] only entered the [open] areas where it was impossible [for the
Palestinian armed groups] to fight.

Human Rights Watch found no evidence (such as bullet holes
in neighboring buildings) to contradict his claim that no Palestinian fighters
were present on or near his property.

Several residents of the Juma’a block corroborated
al-Ajrami’s statement that Palestinian armed groups were active to the
east but not in the immediate area or to the west during the war.
Ala’a Juma’a, 34, told Human Rights Watch, “The resistance
was fighting to the northeast and the IDF came in from the northwest. The
resistance stepped back whenever the IDF advanced.”[197]
According to Hassan Ahmad Juma’a, 60, an imam who left the area on
January 4, “The fighters were to the east of here, around the
mosque,” approximately 400 meters to the east.[198]

According to Imad al-Abid Juma’a, whose home was
damaged, some members of the Juma’a family fought with armed
groups. Khaled Ibrahim Juma’a, a fighter, had been killed in
fighting against the IDF in 2000. The second-floor apartment of a
three-story house that was destroyed – the largest house on the block
– belonged to Osama Juma’a, a 30-year-old member of
Hamas’s al-Qassam Brigades, who lived there with his wife and five
children. Imad Juma’a told Human Rights Watch:

Osama was killed in the morning of January 10, near the
mosque, in a drone attack. We buried him at noon. Then two other
martyrs, Ahmad and Omar [Juma’a],
were killed in the afternoon, around 100 meters east of the mosque, as they
were withdrawing, also by drones. Ahmad Juma’a lived with his
parents on the second floor of a house a few houses down from Osama.[199]

The website of the al-Qassam Brigades states that Ahmad
Ibrahim Juma’a, 24, was killed on January 10.[200]
Human Rights Watch could not locate the names of Osama and Omar Juma’a on
the al-Qassam Brigades website or the websites of other armed groups.
According to B’Tselem, “Osamah
Muhammad Ahmad Jum’ah,” 32, was a combatant and member of Hamas
killed on January 10 in the Beit Lahiya area.

Another resident, Yahya Zakariyya Zumailat, 18, stayed in the area until
around January 14, one day after al-Ajrami left. During the conflict,
Zumailat was sheltering in his uncle’s home, about 75 meters south of
al-Ajrami’s property. According to Zumailat, as of January 3, IDF
tanks were stationed “around the Horse Club, about 200 meters to the
northeast of here.” Later, the tanks made incursions to the south but
returned back to this base area.

We heard the sounds of shells and machine guns. Sometimes I
went upstairs in my uncle’s house and snipers shot at us. The tanks and
bulldozers would pass by to the south, and then go back north. They did the
same thing every day. The bulldozers flattened some houses to the south, and
also destroyed groves to the northwest. Early in the morning, around 3 a.m.,
they’d go south, and by 8 a.m. they’d go back. Then it would be
quiet, except if they saw something they’d start to shoot. After around 5
p.m. there would be a period of intensive fire. They were there for 10 days.[201]

Zumailat said there were no fighters in his area and that he
did not witness exchanges of fire, although he could not see the areas to the
south where the tanks went before they returned.

He said that on around January 14, a bulldozer demolished
part of the northern wall of his uncle’s house. “Maybe they
destroyed it because they wanted to take a look inside,” he
speculated.

We looked out from the window and they saw us, and they
left. Then we left. Me, my parents, my grandfather, and my younger
brothers walked to my girlfriend’s house in the Nasser area [in Gaza
City]. An Apache [helicopter] was firing behind us as we were walking. The road
was destroyed so we walked beside it. When we left, I saw the houses of the
Juma’a family. They were still OK. There was a shed next to a mosque that
had been pushed into the middle of the street, to cut it off.

Zumailat said that the area was depopulated by this point
and that the only ongoing military activity he witnessed came from the
IDF. “There was no fighting. The first time we saw any
[Gazan] people was in the al-Karama
neighborhood, two kilometers south of here,” he said.
Zumailat said that his brother, Muhammad, 12, and his sister, Hadil, 15, returned to the
area the next day during the three-hour “lull” in fighting to get the
family’s kerosene stove. On approximately January 15, three days
before the end of the war, he said they told him that the Juma’a houses
were still standing.

Abd al-Karim Abu
Nahim, 40, told Human Rights Watch that he stayed with his mother and
brother in their home until January 17, one day before the end of the
war. Abu Nahim, who is unemployed, lives on the ground floor of a
multi-story concrete residential building facing the same east-west road that
forms the northern border of the Juma’a family block.

On the last two days of the war, Friday and Saturday, the
IDF had reached Sudaniyya Street [the main east-west road in the area, one
block south of his house], and the tanks were down there and the troops were up
here on foot, breaking into houses. They had been firing at this
building. Our upstairs neighbors told us the Israelis shot at their
window because they saw something move. So my mother raised a white flag
and went out but they shot at her and she was wounded in one hand. This was
Saturday at 11 a.m., on the last day. At 4 p.m. they broke into my house. There
were scores of soldiers. They detained me and my brother.[202]

Abu Nahim said there was no fighting in his immediate area,
and that most of the destruction occurred during the final week of the
war. “They reached here by around the second week of the ground
war, and they stayed here during the third week. We couldn’t look
out, but we could hear the bulldozers.” After being detained, Abu
Nahim said, the soldiers took him and his brother to a prison inside Israel,
where they were interrogated. Within a week, by around January 24, he said,
they were released through the Erez crossing back into Gaza and returned to the
Siyafa area.

Al-‘Amudi Street

Two blocks to the east of the Juma’a block is the
intersection between Sudaniyya road and the north-south road leading to
al-Atatra, al-‘Amudi Road.
Two blocks to the north of the intersection, residents of the area pointed out
to Human Rights Watch the remains of 15 homes that had been destroyed along the
eastern side of the road. Residents of that block said three homes were
destroyed; and on the third block, a further two homes were destroyed on the
east side of al-‘Amudi Road, as well as a plumber’s shop, a BMW spare-parts shop, and a home
on the west side.[203]

Interviews with a number of residents confirmed that
Palestinian fighters were present in the area during the conflict. Ra’id
abd el-Rahman, 33, showed Human Rights Watch damage to one of the interior cinderblock walls of his home,
which he speculated had been caused by fighters using a sledgehammer
to clear an opening to escape out the side of the house. “They
couldn’t make it through, so they went to the next room and took off the
door,” he said.[204]
Osama Ziyad as-Sultan, 33, and Fawziya Muhammad as-Sultan, 51, lived in a
two-story building that was destroyed.[205] Osama said
that he learned from members of armed groups that the IDF completely occupied
the neighborhood by January 15, and that at that time the al-Sultan’s
home was still standing. His own experience seemed to confirm that it was
destroyed late in the war, since “the house was still on fire” when
he returned on January 19, he said.

It is possible that IDF armored vehicles destroyed some of
the makeshift homes next to al-Amudi
street when they first entered the area by driving next to the street
rather than on it, in an attempt to avoid anti-tank mines or bombs that might
have been placed on the road. The presence of fighters in the area may
also account for some of the destruction. However, these considerations
do not appear to account for the IDF’s complete destruction of 23 homes
and two shops on both sides of the road for three blocks, and of multiple
dunams of citrus and olive groves in the area, particularly in cases where the
destruction occurred after IDF armor and ground troops had already occupied the
area.

The al-Sultans’ former neighbor was Latifa Atta Khalil
al-Ankah, about 65.
According to al-Ankah, the IDF destroyed the three-story building where she
lived with her husband and
an unmarried son and daughter, and another son and his family. IDF bulldozers also
destroyed three of the family’s six greenhouses, and a quarter-acre
grove of fruit trees. She recalled that on a Wednesday, either January 7 or
January 14, Israeli soldiers forcibly entered her house and told her to
evacuate. “I told him to leave me alone in my house. He said,
‘You have no house.’ I took an alley to the east. My house
and the grove were still all right when I left. The al-Sultan’s house was
still standing too.”[206]
Al-Ankah said that no Palestinian fighters were present in the area at the
time. Her son, Bassam al-Ankah, 30, showed Human Rights Watch fragments
of shrapnel he said he found in the house. He said that three tanks shells hit
the second floor.

Slightly north of the intersection with Sudaniyya street lives Atallah Rihan, a 67-year-old
writer, who said bulldozers destroyed an outbuilding containing his office and library as well as
nearly three dunams (0.3 hectares) of citrus trees to the south of his
house. According to Rihan, “The resistance was active here only on
the first two days of the aerial offensive [December 27 and 28].”
Nonetheless, Rihan said, “The shelling was continuous from artillery and
the navy. It was a mess. The tanks were maybe 500 meters to the
northwest.” Although the Israeli military had previously dropped
fliers stating that the area was a closed military zone, “and broke into
the radio transmissions saying that everyone to the north of Sudaniyya road should
go,” Rihan said he stayed until intensive shelling on approximately
January 11 made him fear for his life. He believed, though he was
not certain, that IDF ground troops had reached his area two days before that
point. “When we left the [olive and citrus] trees were still all
here,” Rihan said. “There wasn’t major destruction yet,
either on the street or to the east, where we walked. When we came back
all my trees and the olive trees belonging to the as-Sultan family were
gone.”[207]

Hadija
Hassan Saqir, 55, owned a three-story building immediately north of
Rihan’s home. Before the war, she said, 15 people lived in the
building, including her and her husband,
as well as her two grown sons and their families. When Human Rights Watch
visited the area, the support pillars and several walls of Saqir’s
building were still standing, but it had suffered extensive damage on all
floors, rendering the building only partly habitable. “We spent the
first three days of the ground incursion here,” Saqir said, “and
then they hit the house with a tank shell from the north.”[208]
The building appeared to have been hit multiple times by shells entering the
sides of the building from the north, east and south, consistent with tank
shells fired at a relatively flat trajectory, but the family had cleared away
the damage to the extent that it was not possible to confirm what munitions had
been used. “Some people told me that until the last three days of
the war the house wasn’t destroyed,” Saqir said. “A woman who
was looking for a missing person that day said the doors of my house were open
and she went inside to look. At that point it was just the one tank
shell.” Saqir pointed out three dunams (0.3 hectares) of land on
the eastern side of the house, where only compacted dirt, small mounds and some tread marks were visible; she
said this had been a small citrus tree grove.

Many of the former residents of these destroyed homes now
live in a tent camp that Hamas authorities have set up in a nearby vacant lot. Sa’id
Rumailat, an unemployed 34-year-old, was living in the camp and said there was
no running water, no electricity, and only canned food to eat. Rumailat
showed Human Rights Watch a heap of wood and corrugated metal lying beside
al-‘Amudi street that he said used to be his home where he lived with his
wife and four children. On approximately January 6, he saw people coming
south along the road from al-Atatra, carrying white flags. “They were on
foot, there were no cars because the F16s had bombed and cut off the road.
They said, ‘Why are you staying here? People are being
killed.’”[209]
Rumailat and his family left that day, with his home intact. “When
we came back, my house had been pushed into the middle of the street.
Inside my house we found a steel pipe with regular cuts in one side of it, from the bulldozer
treads.”

Khuza’a,
al-Shoka, and al-Fokhari

Israeli forces entered several areas near the Sufa crossing
in south-eastern Gaza on or after January 11, residents said. Human
Rights Watch visited the village of Khuza’a, which lies very close to the 1949 armistice line, and
the agricultural areas of al-Shokha and al-Fokhari, to the southwest. The latter areas are
divided by the road that leads north from the Sufa crossing point, with
al-Fokhari lying on the western side of the road. In the case of
Khuza’a, residents witnessed bulldozers destroying residential buildings
on January 11 and 13. In al-Shoka and al-Fokhari, residents said they
fled their homes during attacks that began on January 14, and returned after
January 18 to find their homes bulldozed. While in al-Shoka and al-Fokhari many buildings were
destroyed during a period when residents had left the area and before they
returned, the type and extent of the destruction are not consistent with
attacks against individual military objects or with damage sustained during
fighting.

Human Rights Watch investigated homes that were demolished
on the extreme eastern edge of Khuza’a, which lies approximately 500
meters from the 1949 armistice line. Human Rights Watch is unaware of any
evidence or Israeli claims, and residents of Khuza’a denied, that houses
in the neighborhood were used to cover tunnels or for other military
purposes. It does not appear likely that the IDF would have destroyed
these buildings in an attempt to prevent the construction of tunnels from
houses to the border, because much of Khuza’a lies close enough to the
border to enable tunneling. The IDF has not provided any information to explain
why it destroyed these houses.

Satellite imagery (see Khuza’a, below) shows that the
IDF also destroyed greenhouses, areas of cultivated agricultural land, and
other structures on the opposite side of the village from the swathe of
destroyed houses Human Rights Watch investigated. It would have been difficult
to tunnel towards the Israeli border from these other destroyed areas; their
destruction may indicate that the IDF targeted areas that posed less risk to
the troops carrying out the demolition, since no demolitions by ground forces
occurred in or near the center of the village but only on its outskirts or in
exposed open areas nearby. The areas of al-Shoka and al-Fokhari where
Human Rights Watch documented destruction lie more than 2.8 kilometers from the
border.

Members of Palestinian armed groups engaged with IDF forces
in Khuza’a, but residents of Khuza’a, al-Shoka and al-Fokhari said
no militants were in these areas at the time Israeli forces attacked.

In addition to destroying 53 private homes, agricultural
land, greenhouses and two cement factories in these areas, Israeli forces also
blew up a large, 30-meter-high water tank that serviced the communities of
al-Shoka, al-Fokhari and al-Nasir.[210]Atra Abd al-Majid al-Amor,
90, who lived next to the water tank, did not witness its demolition, but he
told Human Rights Watch that a nearby house was also demolished in the
explosion (Human Rights Watch did not examine this house).[211]
Human Rights Watch researchers found large amounts of electrical wiring
produced by Teldor, an Israeli company that supplies
the IDF with equipment including wires and cables, which may have been used to wire explosives around the tower.[212]
A water tower used by three civilian agricultural communities constitutes an
object indispensable to the survival of the civilian population
and cannot be destroyed.[213]

Khuza’a

Situated east of Khan Yunis and approximately 500 meters
from the 1949 armistice line with Israel, the village of Khuza’a is one
of the Palestinian residential areas closest to Israel. Residents can see IDF
watchtowers on the armistice line, which is separated from the village by open
fields.

It is possible that the IDF destroyed homes in Khuza’a
in order to create a buffer zone extending west from the de facto border with
Israel. The laws of war do not permit a party to the conflict to raze all
civilian structures in a given area on the grounds that it would provide a
buffer zone for a potential future armed conflict (see “Legal
Obligations”).

From January 11 to 13, according to residents, Israeli
militarized bulldozers destroyed a number of houses on the northeastern edge of
Khuza’a, which lies closest to the armistice line. All the houses, on the
northeastern side of Azata Street,
belonged to the extended al-Najjar family. Human Rights Watch confirmed
the destruction of 14 houses on the edge of the village on January 13.[214]
Residents of the al-Najjar area said there was no fighting in the area, and
that Israeli forces had established control over that area and areas further
inside the village when their homes were destroyed.

UNOSAT analysis
of satellite imagery confirmed that the vast majority of damage sites in
Khuza’a – 109 of 118 sites – were struck from January 11 to
18, and that “almost all of the damage was along the eastern edge of
Khoza’a, near the border with Israel.”[215]

Residents told Human Rights Watch that no fire was directed
at the bulldozers from these homes, and Hamas had not occupied, stored weapons,
or placed booby-traps in
their homes prior to their destruction.[216] These
statements are consistent with statements by several residents that they fled
their homes at the last moment during bulldozer attacks.

Residents and local human rights activists told Human Rights
Watch that Palestinian fighters had been active in the area, and an Islamic Jihad
commander told the media that about a dozen fighters had directly engaged the
IDF in Khuza’a.[217]
By these same accounts, the fighting was light, with the fighters retreating as
Israeli forces advanced. In a series of ground incursions between January 11
and 13, Israeli forces engaged Palestinian fighters, and local officials
reported numerous civilian casualties.[218] According to
B’Tselem, Israeli forces killed five Palestinian militants in the village
on January 11 and January 13.[219]

The IDF’s assault on Khuza’a began
around 9:30 p.m. on January 10, with an intense artillery barrage in the area.[220]
The IDF heavily used air-burst, artillery-fired white phosphorus, killing one
woman and injuring dozens of others.[221]

The next day, January 11, IDF ground forces moved into the
al-Najjar district of Khuza’a for the first time. From
approximately 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. they stayed on the edge of the village,
residents said, and D9 bulldozers destroyed several homes. The IDF
returned around 3 a.m. on January 12 and destroyed some more homes, withdrawing
again around noon.

The next assault took place around midnight on
January 13. After heavy shelling throughout the night, the IDF
established full control of the
area’s perimeter with armored bulldozers and tanks. By early morning, approximately 100 neighborhood residents had gathered
in a small garden. Tanks and bulldozers reached the edge of the
village and Israeli soldiers used megaphones to order the residents to go to
the village center. According to three witnesses, when residents began to
move, soldiers who had advanced into the neighborhood shot in their direction
and forced them to turn around.[222]

Witnesses said that Israeli forces occupied two houses
further inside the neighborhood and on the morning of January 13 fired on
civilian residents attempting to flee while holding white flags. An
Israeli sniper shot and killed Rawhiya
al-Najjar from a firing position in the doorway or just outside the doorway
of one of the houses, suggesting he was not afraid of being exposed to enemy
fire.[223]

The homes demolished in the al-Najjar district lay on the
extreme perimeter of the village where the tanks and bulldozers had established
control.[224]
After the fighting, because Israeli border guards routinely fire on Palestinians
venturing towards the armistice line, it was not possible for Human Rights
Watch to observe all the homes in the area that residents said were destroyed.[225]
Human Rights Watch confirmed the destruction of 14 buildings in this small area
and observed two more buildings that were partly demolished.[226]
The destruction we documented left at least 119 people homeless.

Nabil al-Najjar told Human Rights Watch that at 6:30 a.m. on
January 13, three large, militarized bulldozers approached his home, towards
the southeastern part of the area, after they had already destroyed several
other houses belonging to his relatives, Ashraf and Fuad, and while one or two
other bulldozers were leveling Fathi an-Najjar’s home nearby. “I
saw them coming and was shouting at them in Hebrew that there were people here,
a family was here,” he said.[227]
He was not sure if the bulldozer operators could hear or see him.

The first two came for the house, but my house is on a small hill with
nine steps leading up to it, and it was not a quick job. They piled up
sand in ramps and began destroying the balconies, then they hit the support
pillars. There were around 20 support pillars. The third bulldozer
was cleaning up the yard. When I couldn’t get them to stop I
evacuated my family. We ran down the street to a relative’s home.

By around noon that day, many members of the al-Najjar
family managed to leave the area.[228]

A number of factors – the fact that Israeli forces
controlled the perimeter area of the town at
the time the destruction occurred; the accounts of residents that no militants,
weapons or booby-traps were
present in those buildings; and the fact that this area is the closest to
Israeli territory – indicated that the IDF demolished these homes in
order to increase the buffer zone or no man’s land between Israeli
territory and inhabited parts of the Gaza Strip. Statements by Israeli
soldiers, the Israeli military’s subsequent expansion of the buffer zone
to 300 meters, and the Israeli military’s past practice of clearing
buffer zones in other areas of Gaza such as Rafah, support such a
conclusion. Even if this destruction of the civilian property served a
military purpose, the extensive destruction raises serious concerns under the
laws of war that the loss of civilian property was excessive in comparison to
any expected military gain. It further appeared during Human Rights
Watch’s research in the area that Israeli forces stationed at the border
exerted significant control over the area between the edge of Khuza’a and
the border, as residents warned against stepping into that area due to prior
experiences of drawing fire from Israeli forces. The destruction of the
homes along the edge of Khuza’a would have extended Israel’s field
of fire by only a few dozen meters, at most. The destruction of these
homes would not, as mentioned above, provide Israel with any significant
security advantage by preventing tunnels being dug from them towards the
border, since tunnels could as easily be dug from the row of homes immediately
behind the ones that were destroyed, or from many other parts of Khuza’a.

Al-Shoka

To the southwest of Khuza’a, a road runs from the Sufa
crossing point towards Salahaddin Road, Gaza’s main north-south
artery. On the northern side of the Sufa road lies the agricultural area of al-Shoka, which is flat and
open from the border to an elevated area near Salahaddin Road. Residents
in the part of the al-Shoka area nearest the Sufa crossing, said that Israeli
ground forces entered the area in armored vehicles after sunset on January
14.

Zayed Ahmed
Thabit, 53, told Human Rights Watch that he left the area that night when
tanks reached an elevated area on Salahaddin Road, to the west, and began
firing back towards the area. Thabit said that the following day, as he
tried to return to the area to help evacuate a neighbor’s family, he saw
four bulldozers on Salahaddin Street. He said there were no Palestinian
military activities in the area, and that all the buildings that were
subsequently destroyed (in most cases apparently by bulldozers) were still
standing when most other residents fled on January 15. He discounted the possibility that fighters could have used
the open fields. “There was nothing left to destroy around
here,” he said. “There have been no trees in the fields near
the border for a long time,” due to previous Israeli incursions.
Lacking cover, he said, fighters would have been visible to Israeli ground
forces from long distances and exposed to aerial attacks.[229]

Attaya
family

The extended Attaya family lived in two separate clusters of
homes in al-Shoka. One part of the family lived in 12 houses packed
closely together near an intersection 300 meters southwest of Sufa Road.
Most of the homes were constructed of concrete and corrugated
metal; one two-story home was made of reinforced concrete. The
destruction of these structures left 40 people homeless.[230]
When Human Rights Watch visited the area, some of the residents had returned
and set up tents in the rubble of their former homes.

The owner of the two-storey building, Talal Sulaiman Attaya, 37, and his wife Zenam Salim Attaya, told Human
Rights Watch that the entire family evacuated the area on January 14, when the
area came under intense shelling at the beginning of the ground invasion.[231]
Nahed Attaya, 35, interviewed separately, also said that their group left the
area for Khan Yunis on the first day of the ground invasion, after the area
came under tank fire from the east during the afternoon. “It
wasn’t fighters, it was all wheat around here,” he said.
“We rented six dunams of farmland to grow wheat and vegetables.
It’s all torn up now. During the last incursion they just destroyed the
trees.”[232]

Zenam Attaya told Human Rights Watch, “We spent a week
away [after we fled]. And when we came back it was all destroyed. Nothing
had hit the house when we left. When we got back we saw some charred areas on the roof, and
bulldozer tracks.”[233]

Talal Attaya added that Israeli forces completed, during the
latest incursion, the destruction of his five dunams (0.5 hectares) of olive
trees, which had been partly destroyed in an incursion the previous year.[234]

Nahed Attaya said that Israeli forces also destroyed nine
large greenhouses, used to grow cucumbers, on the opposite side of the lane
that forms the western border of the family’s residential area.[235]
Human Rights Watch confirmed that some greenhouses had been destroyed but could
not determine the number, since the area where the greenhouses used to be had subsequently been cleared.

In another cluster of homes nearby lived a second cluster of
the extended Attaya family. Atiyya Ahmad Attaya, 69, showed Human Rights Watch the
remains of destroyed homes in two adjoining compounds. Researchers
examined the remains of 12 destroyed homes, which residents said had been
occupied by 66 people.[236]
Residents said they had found extensive bulldozer tracks in the area.

Attiya
Attaya told Human Rights Watch that Israeli aerial strikes hit roads and
open areas before the ground invasion. In the evening of January 14,
“we saw the tanks and bulldozers, still half a mile away to the east,
but others had gone north and were coming back down here. We heard
drones.” Just before sunset, he and all the other residents of the
area left, heading west, due to shelling. Ahmed Atayya, 20, said that a
shell, possibly from a tank, hit the kitchen of his house, prompting the family
to evacuate the area 10 minutes later. “We went west to the
European Hospital, a mile and a half away, and spent six days there.”[237]

The family returned within one or two days after the war
ended to find their homes and nearby fields had been completely destroyed,
apparently by bulldozers. “No one told me that this had happened,”
Atiyya said. “There was no resistance in any house here. I don’t
know why they destroyed them.”

Attaya said
his home was 25-years-old; the most recent construction in the area was his
son’s house, built in 2000. The family lost 22 dunams (five and a half
acres) of 50-year-old olive trees.

Al-Imtiaz Concrete
Mixing Factory

To Human Rights Watch’s knowledge, Israeli forces
destroyed every concrete factory in the al-Shoka and al-Fokhari areas during the incursion. Human
Rights Watch observed destroyed property at the al-Imtiaz factory including a
two-story building shared by workers and management, the concrete wall around
the factory, three steel silos for storing cement, a conveyor belt, a storage
tank for sand and gravel, and two weighing machines. Muhammad Sabri Abu Daqqa, 20, the son of the owner,
Sabri Abu Daqqa, said that the al-Imtiaz factory had been partly bulldozed
during a prior incursion in May 2008.

According to Abu Daqqa, so far as he was aware, no one had
witnessed the complete destruction of the immovable parts of the factory. “We used
to have a guard, but he was arrested during a previous incursion last
year,” he said. “And it was impossible to get here during the
war.”[238]
A resident of the nearby al-Fokhari area said that he saw tanks near the
al-Imtiaz factory site on the evening of January 14.[239]

The factory was demolished with a combination of bulldozers
and explosive charges, Abu Daqqa said. “We saw mines and wires all over
the place” when he returned to the factory after the ceasefire, he said;
Hamas de-miners subsequently removed the shrapnel and debris from the site.
Human Rights Watch could not confirm the kinds of explosive munitions used but
the remains of bulldozer tracks were still visible.

At its full capacity, the factory could produce 100 cubic
meters of concrete per hour, and employed 20 workers. Abu Daqqa told Human
Rights Watch that the factory had been able to operate, to an extent, during
the ceasefire from June to November 4, 2008. “Whenever Israel
allowed cement in, Hamas gave us a share of it.”

Unlike most other factories, the al-Imtiaz factory’s
vehicles were not destroyed: the owners had evacuated all moveable property,
including the valuable mixing and pump trucks, to an area near Khan Yunis when
Israel’s aerial campaign began, Abu Daqqa told Human Rights Watch.

Al-Fokhari

Al-Fokhari lies on the eastern side of Sufa road, across
from al-Shoka. Human Rights Watch visited destroyed homes belonging to
the extended al-Amor family,
not far from the road dividing the two areas.[240]

Al-Amor houses

Like the Atayya
family in al-Shoka, the al-Amor family said they had fled the area on
January 14 due to heavy shelling. They said that militants were not present in
the area and had not made use of their homes in the past. According to
Sulaiman al-Amor, a 35-year-old cement truck driver, “We fled at around
sunset when a tank shell hit the houses. I didn’t have time even to take
my ID. The tanks were nearly at the al-Imtiaz factory.”[241]
Al-Amor said his family spent four days at the UNRWA al-Farabi elementary school, before returning home to
find their houses had all been destroyed.

Based on information from several residents, during the
offensive Israeli forces destroyed 10 houses where 67 people lived.[242]
Most of the homes were more than 10 years old. Atwa al-Amor, 30, said the family owned 30 dunams of
olive trees that were razed by bulldozers.[243]

Abu Sita Concrete Mixing Factory and al-Amor
and al-Orjan Homes

Across open fields to the east of the Attaya family’s
property, the Abu Sita concrete factory sits on a road that intersects with Sufa
Road half a mile to the north.[244]
The factory’s owner, Samir Abd al-Qadir Abu Sita, 52, told Human Rights
Watch that he did not witness it himself, but residents of the area told him
the factory was destroyed on January 16.

Human Rights Watch observed that three cement pump trucks,
four cement mixing trucks, two dump trucks, two small bulldozers and two
private cars had been destroyed on the lot. The lot was covered in large
track marks consistent with the treads of a militarized bulldozer; the type of
damage to the factory vehicles, which were pushed onto their sides or flipped
upside down and partly or wholly crushed, also suggested that large militarized
bulldozers had destroyed them. The main factory building and the
metal silo used to store cement, had been damaged by heavy machine gun fire.

Before Israel closed Gaza’s borders to cement imports
in early November 2008, Samir Abu Sita said, the factory employed 26 workers
and could produce 120 cubic meters of concrete per hour.

On the eastern side of the lot, behind the factory area,
were the remains of two concrete homes, both of which had been three stories
high. Their destruction left nine families homeless.[245]

Immediately to the east of the Abu Sita family property,
three other homes had also been demolished. Human Rights Watch spoke to Eid Sulaiman al-Orjan, 70, and
his sons Sulaiman Eid, 42, Ahmad Eid, 39; and Salim Eid, 29. During a group interview, the al-Orjan
family members said 18 people had lived in the buildings, all of whom left the
area together after sundown on Wednesday, January 14, because of shelling from
the east. “They targeted the big houses first, with tanks,”
Sulaiman al-Orjan said. “There were also lots of airstrikes in open
areas.”[246]
The family fled to an UNRWA school to the west, leaving their houses and the
concrete factory relatively unscathed.

Ahmad al-Orjan said that the family returned after the
ceasefire to find all their goats had died, possibly due to a white phosphorus
attack. “Their eyes and noses were covered in fluid when we
returned,” he said, which he believed was the result of their inhaling a
poisonous chemical. He also saw the charred remains of burning wedges
consistent with white phosphorus munitions in the area.

Sulaiman al-Orjan added that most of the family’s 20
dunams (2 hectares) of wheat had been destroyed by IDF vehicles.

International Legal Obligations and Property
Destruction

International humanitarian law, the laws of
war, governs fighting between Israel and Palestinian armed groups in the Gaza
Strip that rises to the level of armed conflict, including during Operation
Cast Lead. This law binds all parties to an armed conflict, whether they are
states or non-state armed groups.

Since Operation Cast Lead, the Israeli
government has sought to justify the destruction of property in Gaza on several
grounds. Buildings destroyed were said to have been used by Hamas, were
booby-trapped or hid entrances to tunnels, or could be used for future attacks
by being close to the armistice line with Israel. The factual validity of
some of these claims is discussed above – but they also raise important
questions as a matter of law. While Israeli forces destroyed property for
legitimate military reasons, Human Rights Watch found that the large-scale
destruction of property in the cases detailed in this report violated
Israel’s international legal obligations.

International humanitarian law does not
address the legality of a decision by a state or a non-state armed group to
resort to war (jus ad bellum). Rather, it focuses on the legality
of the conduct of the parties to hostilities that have reached the level of
armed conflict (jus in bello). The laws of war governing the methods and
means of warfare are primarily found in the Hague Regulations of 1907 and the
First Additional Protocol of 1977 to the Geneva Conventions (Protocol I).[247]
Although neither treaty formally applies to the armed
conflict in Gaza,[248]
most of the provisions of both are considered reflective of customary law.[249] Also
applicable is article 3 common to the four Geneva Conventions of 1949 (Common
Article 3), which concerns the treatment of civilians and combatants who are no
longer taking part in the fighting and provisions of the Fourth Geneva
Convention of 1949 addressing occupied territories.[250]

Central to the law regulating conduct of
hostilities is the principle of distinction, which requires parties to a
conflict to distinguish at all times between combatants and civilians.
Operations may be directed only against combatants and other military
objectives; civilians and civilian objects may not be the
target of attack.[251]

Civilian objects have been defined as all objects that are
not military objectives.[252]Military objectives are those objects which “by their
nature, location, purpose or use make an effective contribution to military
action and whose total or partial destruction, capture or neutralization, in
the circumstances ruling at the time, offers a definite military advantage”
[emphasis added].[253]In cases of doubt there is a presumption that objects normally dedicated
to civilian purposes – houses and other dwellings, schools, places of
worship, and hospitals – are not subject to attack.[254]
Civilian objects remain protected from attack, unless and only for such time
that they become military objectives. Once a civilian object that is a
military objective – such as a house used as a military headquarters
– ceases being used to further the military aims of the adversary, it may
no longer be subject to attack.[255]

Deliberate, indiscriminate or disproportionate
attacks against civilians and civilian objects are prohibited. Attacks are
indiscriminate when they are not directed at a specific military objective or
employ a method or means of warfare that cannot be directed at a military
objective or whose effects cannot be limited.[256]
A disproportionate attack is one in which the expected incidental loss of
civilian life and damage to civilian objects would be excessive in relation to
the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated. [257]

In the conduct of military operations, parties
to a conflict must take constant care to spare the civilian population and
civilian objects from the effects of hostilities.[258]
Parties are required to take precautionary measures with a view to avoiding,
and in any event minimizing, incidental loss of civilian life, injury to
civilians, and damage to civilian objects.[259]

Before conducting an attack, parties to a
conflict must do everything feasible to verify that the persons or objects to
be attacked are military objectives and not civilians or civilian objects.[260]
In its Commentary to Protocol I, the International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC) explains that the requirement to take all “feasible”
precautions means, among other things, that those conducting an attack are
required to take the steps needed to identify the target as a legitimate
military objective “in good time to spare the population as far as
possible.”[261]The United Kingdom military manual illustrates the rule with the
following example: “If, for example, it is suspected that a schoolhouse
situated in a commanding tactical position is being used by an adverse party as
an observation post and gun emplacement, this suspicion, unsupported by
evidence, is not enough to justify an attack on the schoolhouse.”[262]

The Hague Regulations forbid during
hostilities the unnecessary destruction of the enemy’s property.[263] The Geneva Conventions prohibit as a grave breach the
“extensive destruction and appropriation of property, not justified by
military necessity and carried out unlawfully and wantonly.”[264]
Similarly during an occupation, article 53 of the Fourth Geneva Convention
prohibits the destruction of property by an occupying power “except where
such destruction is rendered absolutely necessary by military
operations.”[265]
The prohibition on “wanton destruction” is a longstanding rule of
customary international law, dating at least back to the US Lieber Code of
1863, the first modern codification of the laws of war.[266]

The rule of military necessity was defined in the Lieber
Code, and later adopted by the ICRC, as “the necessity of those measures
which are indispensable for securing the ends of the war, and which are lawful
according to the modern law and usages of war.”[267]In other words, military necessity cannot be used as an excuse to
violate explicit IHL provisions, because the requirements of military necessity
have already been incorporated into IHL rules.[268]Military necessity incorporates the fundamental legal obligation to
avoid damage to civilian property by distinguishing military objectives from
civilian objects, only permitting attacks on the former, and prohibiting such
destruction if the expected civilian harm is disproportionate to the direct
military advantage anticipated.

The concept of military necessity thus rejects measures that
are viewed as a means to justify an otherwise unlawful attack, are not intended
to defeat the enemy or that violate the laws of war by excessively damaging
civilian objects in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage
anticipated from the attack. While the rule of military necessity grants
military planners considerable autonomy about the appropriate tactics for
carrying out a military operation, this autonomy remains subservient to the
laws and customs of war.[269]

The Israeli government has asserted that the rules in effect
for its forces on property destruction during Operation Cast Lead were in
accordance with international law. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs report
of July 29, 2009 notes that the “operational order for the Operation in
Gaza specifically stated that ‘[a]ll IDF activities are subject to the
principles and rules of international law,’” including the
principles of “military necessity, distinction, proportionality, and
humanity.” The order further provided that “[d]estruction of
property shall be allowed only for imperative operational necessity and provided
that the damage for the property would be proportional to the military
advantage gained by the destruction. The destruction of property for deterrence
purposes is forbidden.”[270]
It defined military necessity as the principle that, subject to the other
principles and rules, “an attack shall be permitted as long as it is
necessary to achieve a military purpose in the course of the military
campaign.”[271]

An IDF investigation into the destruction of property in
Gaza, published on April 22, 2009, exonerated the IDF of any illegal
destruction of property and found that the orders provided to Israeli forces
regarding property demolitions were lawful. It stated that “the orders
and directions given with regard to damage to property during the operation, at
all levels, emphasized that all demolition operations should be carried out in
a manner which would minimize to the greatest extent possible the damage caused
to any property not used by Hamas and other terror organizations in the
fighting.” The only fault found was that “it was apparent
that that this issue [property demolition] was not stressed sufficiently in the
written plans for the operation.”[272]

The Foreign Ministry report and the IDF investigation
conclude that the destruction of houses and other civilian property met the
requirements of military necessity as required by the laws of war. It
reaches that conclusion on the basis that the properties destroyed were
military objectives and that their destruction was not disproportionate.

Human Rights Watch found that in the incidents investigated
in this report, the destroyed properties were not military objectives as the
term is widely understood. Thus, even where the IDF asserted a military rationale
for the destruction of the property, the objects still did not meet
the requirements for a military objective and thus were not subject to
attack or destruction.

Human Rights Watch distinguishes these cases from those in
which the civilian property was a military objective, such as when used by
Palestinian armed groups to deploy fighters, to store ammunition or other
materiel, or to rig with booby-traps, and thus could be targeted.

As noted, a civilian object becomes subject to attack as a
military objective when it makes an effective contribution to
military action and its destruction in the
circumstances ruling at the time provides a definite military advantage.
These criteria are critical for determining whether the destruction of property
is lawful. Thus, according to the US army field manual’s regulations
for destruction in the context of hostilities, there must be a
“reasonably closeconnection between the destruction of property
and the overcoming of the enemy’s army.”[273]

Human Rights Watch found instances, detailed
above, where it appeared that property was destroyed for its past use as a
military objective – that is, for possible punitive reasons – and
because of its predicted future use as a military objective – for
anticipatory reasons. International humanitarian law prohibits the
punitive destruction of property and places sharp limits on what constitutes a
military objective’s future use.

Destruction of property that is no longer or was previously used as a
military objective is not permitted. With
regard to recently captured areas, the UK military manual states:

[O]nce the defended locality has surrendered or been
captured, only such further damage is permitted as is demanded by the
exigencies of war, for example removal of fortifications, demolition of
military structures, destruction of military stores, or measures for the
defence of the locality. It is not permissible to destroy a public building or
private house because it was defended.[274]

One highly respected academic commentator has previously
criticized as a matter of law the IDF’s destruction of houses for
punitive purposes:

Destruction of houses as a (legitimate) integral part of
military operations must be distinguished from demolitions of residential
buildings carried out as a post-combat punitive measure. Israel has
resorted to such measures in its fight against terrorism in occupied
territories. In support of the Israeli policy it has been maintained that
if hand grenades are hurled out of a house (or if terrorists use the premises
to prepare an attack), that house becomes a military base, so there is no
difference between immediate military reaction leading to its destruction and
later demolition as a punitive measure. However, it is wrong to believe that,
once used for combat purposes, a civilian object (like a residential building)
is tainted permanently as a military objective. As long as combat is in
progress, the destruction of property – even in occupied territories
– is permissible, if rendered necessary by military operations.
Yet, subsequent to the military operations, destruction of property is no
longer compatible with modern [law of international armed conflict].[275]

A civilian object can be a military objective
if the concrete advantage it provides at the time is of an anticipatory
nature. Thus, a military unit can destroy a house that would block
fields of fire during an expected enemy attack. Nonetheless, the
presumption that a civilian object is not a military objective remains.
Thus, acting on the basis of possible enemy intentions is an
insufficient basis for attacking a civilian object. The above commentator writes that
“field intelligence revealing that the enemy intends to use a particular
school as a munitions depot does not just an attack against the school as long
as the munitions have not been moved in.” He notes: “Purpose
is predicated on intentions known to guide the adversary, and not on those
figured out hypothetically in contingency plans based on a ‘worst case
scenario.’[276]

As the ICRC’s authoritative Commentary
on Protocol I states, “it is not legitimate to launch an
attack which only offers potential or indeterminate advantages.”[277]
Likewise, the authors of the New Rules for Victims of Armed Conflicts note
that the military advantage must be “concrete and perceptible” and
not “hypothetical and speculative.”[278]

The Eritrea Ethiopia Claims Commission, commenting on the
destruction of civilian property by Ethiopian forces retreating from occupied
territory, stated: “The Commission does not agree that denial of
potential future use of properties like these, which are not directly usable
for military operations, as are, for example, bridges or railways, could ever
be justified under Article 53” on the destruction of property.[279]

According to the above commentator, “Certain objects
are normally (by nature) dedicated to civilian purposes and, as long as they
fulfill their essential function, they must not be treated as military
targets.”[280]
Objects such as civilian dwellings and schools may be military objectives when
they are making an “effective contribution to military action…. The
dominant consideration ought to be ‘the circumstances ruling at the
time.’” [281]

Other academic commentators explain that the criterion that
civilian objects be considered as offering a definite military advantage in the
circumstances ruling at the time “is crucial”:

Without this limitation to the actual situation at hand,
the principle of distinction would be meaningless, as every object could, in abstracto and under possible future
developments, become a military objective. It would suffice that in future
enemy troops could occupy a building and transform it into a military
objective.[282]

Some of the incidents of demolitions described
above indicate an expansion by the IDF of the “buffer zone” between
Israel and Gaza. While the law of occupation allows certain security
measures – an occupying power can take preventive measures to enhance the
security of its forces, such as patrols, fortifications, checkpoints, and
taking control of private property – the law concerning destruction of
civilian property remains the same.[283]
As the ICRC Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention notes, the
“prohibition of destruction contained in [article 53 dealing with the law
of occupation] may be compared with the prohibition of pillage and reprisals.”[284]
There is no exception under the Fourth Geneva Convention to article 53, which
limits destruction of property to that which is absolutely necessary for
“military operations.”[285]
Human Rights Watch’s conclusions to the 2004 report Razing Rafah continue
to be applicable:

IDF doctrine appears to inappropriately
conflate military operations linked to fighting with security measures intended
to reduce the general risk to the occupying power. This inherently expansive
interpretation of military operations, with the broader latitude for
destruction, has been a recipe for incremental expansion of the buffer zone as
well as for excessive destruction during incursions into the camp.[286]

Lastly, where destruction is permitted as a
matter of imperative military necessity, it must not be disproportionate.
That is, as noted above, it cannot be expected to cause damage to civilian
objects that would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military
advantage anticipated.[287]
As the Commentary to the Fourth Geneva Convention states,
“whenever it is felt essential to resort to destruction, the occupying
authorities must try to keep a sense of proportion in comparing the military
advantage gained with the damage done.”[288]

With respect to individual responsibility,
serious violations of international humanitarian law committed with criminal
intent are war crimes. War crimes include the “extensive destruction and
appropriation of property, not justified by military necessity and carried out
unlawfully and wantonly,” which are grave breaches of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.[289]

Criminal intent has been defined as violations
committed intentionally or recklessly.[290]
Individuals may also be held criminally liable for attempting to commit a war
crime, as well as assisting in, facilitating, aiding, or abetting a war crime.
Responsibility may also fall on persons planning or instigating the commission
of a war crime.[291]
Commanders and civilian leaders may be prosecuted for war crimes as a matter of
command responsibility when they knew or should have known about the commission
of war crimes and took insufficient measures to prevent them or punish those
responsible.[292]

The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court
includes wanton destruction as a war crime.[293] The International
Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) concluded that the elements
of the war crime of wanton destruction are met where: (i) the destruction of
property occurs on a large scale; (ii) is not justified by military necessity;
and (iii) the perpetrator acted with the intent to destroy the property or in
reckless disregard of its likely destruction.[294]
The ICTY elaborated that “the devastation of property is prohibited
except where it may be justified by military necessity. So as to be
punishable, the devastation must have been perpetrated intentionally or have
been the foreseeable consequence of the acts of the accused.”[295]

Under international humanitarian law, states
have a duty to investigate war crimes allegedly committed by members of their
armed forces and other persons within their jurisdiction. Those found to be
responsible should be prosecuted before courts that meet international fair
trial standards or transferred to another jurisdiction to be fairly prosecuted.[296]

The laws of war also provide for a state to
make full reparations, including directly to individuals, for the loss caused
by violations of the laws of war.[297]

The Gaza Blockade and
Israeli Obligations under the Laws of Occupation

Especially relevant to the humanitarian situation in Gaza is
the law on occupied territories found in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1949,
to which Israel is party. The Fourth Geneva Convention on occupation applies in
Gaza because although Israel withdrew its military forces and settlers from the
Gaza Strip in 2005, it still exercises control over Gaza’s airspace, sea
space and land borders, as well as its electricity, water, sewage and telecommunications
networks and population registry.[298]

Occupying powers have a duty to ensure the security and
well-being of the civilian population in areas under their control. Article 55
of the Fourth Geneva Convention places duties on an occupying power to ensure
the food and medical supplies of the population, and to permit and facilitate
the provision of humanitarian relief. These obligations also apply to specific
Israeli forces wherever in Gaza they exercise effective control. Israel's
continuing blockade of the Gaza Strip, a measure that is depriving its
population of food, fuel, and other necessities, constitutes a form of
collective punishment in violation of article 33 of the Fourth Geneva
Convention.[299]

Customary international humanitarian law prohibits the
attacking, destroying, removing or rendering useless objects indispensible to
the survival of the civilian population. [300] At the same time,
it requires parties to a conflict to allow and facilitate the rapid and
unimpeded passage of impartially distributed humanitarian aid to the
population. It is prohibited to use starvation of the civilian population as a method
of warfare[301]—belligerent
parties must allow the free passage of food relief to civilians at risk.[302]
They must consent to allowing relief operations to take place but may not
refuse such consent on arbitrary grounds. They can take steps to control the content
and delivery of humanitarian aid, such as to ensure that consignments do not
include weapons.[303]
A deliberate refusal to permit access to these supplies in response to military
action can constitute a form of collective punishment or an illegal reprisal
against the civilian population.[304]

Acknowledgements

This report was researched and
written by Bill Van Esveld, researcher in the Middle East and North Africa
Division, and researched by Fares Akram, research consultant in the Middle East
and North Africa division. It was edited by Joe Stork, deputy director of the
Middle East and North Africa Division, James Ross, legal and policy director,
and Iain Levine, program director at Human Rights Watch.

Human Rights Watch sincerely
thanks all the victims and witnesses in Gaza who provided information for the
report.

Thanks
also to the Palestinian and Israeli human rights organizations that provided
assistance, in particular the Al-Mezan Center for Human Rights, Breaking the Silence,
B’Tselem, Gisha, and the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights.

Appendix 1: Human Rights Watch Letter to IDF

Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu

IDF
Spokesperson Unit

International
Organization Desk

Phone: 03
569 1842

Fax: 03 569
8222

August 21,
2009

Dear
Brigadier General Benayahu,

We would
very much appreciate it if your office could provide us with responses to the
questions listed below, which relate to allegations that the IDF engaged in the
destruction of property during “Operation Cast Lead” in violation
of the laws of war. We would appreciate it if you could provide us with a reply
by September 6 in order that we can reflect your views in our forthcoming
report.

I. General
questions

What is
the IDF’s policy regarding the legal doctrine of military necessity
as it applies to property destruction?

What was
the policy of the IDF with regard to the destruction of property during
Operation Cast Lead? In what cases or situations did the IDF
consider it necessary to destroy property?

Were IDF
forces briefed about the IDF’s policy on property destruction
immediately prior to their participation in Operation Cast Lead? At what
level or rank?

How many
homes and factories did the IDF demolish in each of the following
governorates: Rafah, Khan Younis, Middle Gaza, Gaza City, and Northern
Gaza?

Has the
IDF initiated any investigations into allegations of unlawful destruction
of property during Operation Cast Lead, in addition to the investigation
led by Col. Adam Zusman whose results were published on April 22? If so,
which individuals or offices are conducting these investigations, and what
are the terms of reference of the investigations? Will the
investigations’ findings be made public?

II. Incident
questions

Should any
of the below allegations of IDF responsibility for the destruction of property
be inaccurate, please provide corrected information.

Residents
of the Izbt Abd Rabbo neighborhood of Jabalya said that IDF forces had
taken control of the entire eastern and central parts of the neighborhood
[31°31'10.66"N 34°29'56.34"E] by early morning on
January 7, and that there were no sounds of fighting elsewhere in the
western part of the neighborhood after that point. Residents also said
that when IDF forces evicted them from their homes, in some cases as late
as January 12 or 14, almost all of the buildings in the eastern part of
the neighborhood remained standing. Between January 14 and January
18, while the IDF apparently had full control over the area, scores of
homes and a tile warehouse in the eastern part of Izbt Abd Rabbo were
allegedly demolished with anti-tank mines and bulldozers. Why did
the IDF destroy the structures in the eastern part of Izbt Abd Rabbo, and
on what date(s) did this destruction occur?

On the
Eastern Line road, in southern Jabalya, Israeli forces allegedly bulldozed
an animal fodder mill [31°31'21.78"N
34°30'34.62"E], as well as food production establishments
including the Wadiyya Sweet factory and the Gaza Juice Factory. In
the same area, the Abu Eida cement factory [31°30'59.77"N
34°30'17.39"E], the Al-Qonouz cement factory, the Abu Jubbah
cement-packaging factory, and the Al-Tibi cinderblock and cement factory
were all destroyed by a combination of explosives and bulldozers.
Every vehicle on factory grounds was destroyed. Witnesses and
residents said that IDF tanks and bulldozers continuously controlled the
areas where these factories were located from January 4 onward, and were
aware of no militant activity within hundreds of meters. For each of
these factories, for what reason and on what date did the IDF destroy the
facilities? Why did the IDF destroy all the vehicles on factory grounds?

To
the northwest of Gaza City, in southeastern Beit Lahiya, the Badr Flour
Mill [31°33'16.94"N 34°28'5.82"E] was severely damaged
by alledged IDF 40 mm cannon, mortar fire, and other munitions, including
an aerial bomb, on January 10; witnesses were unaware of any presence of
militants in the factory or in the surrounding area at that time. Why
did the IDF attack the Badr Flour Mill? If the IDF believed the Mill
was a military objective, on what basis did it reach this
conclusion?

Near the
Zeytun area south of Gaza City, to the east of Salahaddin Street (which
Israeli troops refer to as “the Tanja”), an electrical appliances
factory [31°28'9.42"N 34°26'6.30"E] and all the
vehicles of the Engineering Company for Concrete and Construction
Materials [31°28'19.26"N 34°26'8.74"E] were
allegedly destroyed by IDF bulldozers. Israeli forces effectively
controlled this area in Zeytun by the January 4, and residents who left on
January 8 said that the factories were still standing at that point.
For each of these factories, for what reason and on what date did the
IDF destroy the facilities?Why did the IDF destroy all the
vehicles on factory grounds?

In the
southeastern Gaza Strip, to the northwest of the Sufa crossing point east
of Khan Yunis, the Al-Imtiaz concrete mixing factory and Abu Sitta
concrete mixing factory [31°16'57.54"N
34°18'54.48"E] were allegedly destroyed by the IDF with a
combination of explosives and bulldozers. Residents said they fled
these areas on January 14 under heavy shelling from approaching tanks, and
said that no militants were present. In the cases of the cement
factories, Israeli forces individually attacked and destroyed or rendered
inoperable each vehicle on factory grounds. For each of these
factories, for what reason and on what date did the IDF destroy the
facilities?Why did the IDF find destroy each vehicle on
factory grounds?

On January
13, around 7:30 a.m., Israeli D9 bulldozers allegedly began demolishing
approximately 16 houses in the al-Najjar neighborhood of Khuza’a
village, east of Khan Yunis. The houses were on the periphery of the
village approximately 100 meters west of the 1949 armistice line.
Previously, bulldozers had demolished four homes in the area on January
11. Witnesses said there had been fighting in the village prior to
January 11, but none immediately prior to or at the time of the
demolitions on January 13. At least one of the homes was occupied by
civilians at the time a bulldozer removed its support pillars
[31°18'38.88"N 34°22'1.98"E]. Residents
reported that no gunfire had ever been directed against IDF forces from
their homes, and that no fighters were present in the area, which lies on
the outskirts of the village. Why did the IDF demolish these 16
houses?

East of
Khan Yunis, in the al-Shoka and al-Fokhari areas, which are separated from
one another by the road leading from the Sufa crossing point, most
residents said they fled under heavy shelling during an IDF ground
incursion on the evening of January 14. Residents living in clusters
of homes [31°17'7.58"N 34°18'52.89"E] amidst
agricultural land said that no militants were operating from this
area. When residents returned on January 18, their homes,
agricultural land including olive and citrus groves, and greenhouses had
allegedly been bulldozed by the IDF. The IDF also allegedly
destroyed a 30-meter-high water tower located near the Sufa road with
mines [31°17'4.72"N 34°18'45.99"E]. Why
did the IDF demolish houses, agricultural land and other structures at
these locations? Why did the IDF destroy the water tower near Sufa Road?

In the
Sudaniyya and Siyafa areas northwest of Gaza City, to the north and east
of the Badr Flour mill (discussed above), Israeli forces allegedly
destroyed 23 homes – some concrete, some (along a road known as
al-Amudi Street) made of corrugated metal. Residents said that
militants were present in a built-up area some 250 meters to the east, but
not in the areas where IDF forces destroyed the affected houses with
bulldozers and, in the case of the concrete-constructed homes, with mines.
In the case of the concrete homes [31 33’09.03” N 34 28’15.79”
E], residents said they were still largely intact on January 13 or 14 and
that no militants were present in the area. Why did the IDF
bulldoze the 23 houses, including along al-Amudi street?

In the
Zeytun area south of Gaza City, Israeli forces allegedly demolished a
large number of homes along two east-west roads (now known as 10th
Road and al-Samuni Road) around 200 meters apart, including homes
belonging to the extended al-Samuni [e.g., 31°28'37.44"N
34°26'5.04"E], Silmi [e.g., 31°28'56.16"N
34°26'19.50"E], Ayad [e.g. 31°28'38.54"N
34°25'59.73"E] and Ishteiwi [31°28'53.22"N
34°26'20.70"E] families, along with the agricultural lands
appurtenant to these homes. Residents said that IDF troops entered
the area from the south on the night of January 3 and controlled the
length of the southern road by the morning of January 5, occupying many
houses. Residents who left on January 5 said their homes and
agricultural property were largely unscathed. Residents of the
northern road, who were unable to leave the area until January 13 or 14,
said that as of the time they left the IDF had complete control of the
area and no militants were present. When residents returned on
January 18, they found dozens of homes and hundreds of dunums of
agricultural land had been destroyed. In what circumstances and on what
date(s) did the IDF destroy homes and agricultural lands along these
roads?

Thank you
for your attention to this request. We would appreciate it very much if you could respond by September
6, 2009.

Sincerely,

Joe Stork

Deputy
Director

Middle East
and North Africa division

Appendix 2: IDF
response

Israel Defense Forces

IDF Spokesperson Unit

International Organizations Desk

Phone: 972-3-5691842 Fax: 972-3-5693971

ז-א
- 3913

Mr. Joe Storl

Deputy Director, Middle East and North Africa Division

Human Rights Watch

Via fax':202-612-4333

Dear Joe Stork,

RE: Reply to your query dated 8/21/09

Please find below our response to your query dated 8/21/09:

Answers to most of your questions, as
well as information relating to other aspects of operation Cast Lead can
be found in "THE OPERATION IN GAZA – FACTUAL AND LEGAL
ASPECTS" report (available at: www.mag.idf.il); and, in the summary
of the findings of the general investigation into "Damage to infrastructure
and destruction of buildings by ground forces", which was published
on April 22nd, 2009 (please find attached a copy of the
relevant pages).

With regard to the specific incidents referred to in your
letter, should suspicion of wrongful conduct arise, and should it remain
unaddressed by the findings of the aforementioned general investigation,
they will be examined by the relevant IDF bodies, as it has been done in
the past, regarding other queries received. In light of the available
information, the Military Advocate General will then decide what
additional steps, if any, should be taken.

Needless to say, that the IDF will not hesitate to
thoroughly investigate any incident or testimony (sufficiently founded),
as it has done to date.

Sincerely,

Lt. Col. Assaf Librati

Head of Public Affairs Branch

IDF Spokesperson Unit

Annex
E:

Primary
Conclusions:

Damage
to infrastructure and destruction of buildings by ground forces

This
investigation, carried out by Col. Adam Zusman, focused on issues relating to
the infrastructure operations and the demolishing of structures by the IDF
forces during the ground operations phase of Operation Cast Lead. During the
investigation the commanders of the forces that participated in the operation
were questioned in relation to the issues being investigated. In addition, the
investigation gathering data from relevant institutions and examined the
relevant military orders.

The
investigation showed that Hamas based its main line of defense on civilian
infrastructure in the Gaza Strip (i.e. buildings, infrastructure, agricultural
lands etc.), and specifically on booby trapped structures (mostly residential),
the digging of explosive tunnels and tunnels intended for the moving of people
and weaponry. This created an above ground and underground deployment in the
Gaza Strip's urban areas by Hamas. During the operation, IDF forces were forced
not only to fight the gunmen themselves, but to also deal with the physical
terrorist infrastructure prepared by the Hamas and other terrorist
organizations in advance. As part of this challenge, the forces demolished
structures that threatened the forces and had to be removed – houses
which were used by the enemy; other structures used by the enemy for terrorist
activity; structures that prevented the forces from moving from one area to
another (given that many of the roads were booby trapped); structures that were
used to protect Israeli soldiers; agricultural elements used as cover for enemy
tunnels and infrastructure; and infrastructure next to the security fence used
by Hamas for operations against IDF forces or for digging tunnels into Israeli
territory.

IDF
operations which were intended to demolish booby trapped or structures rigged
with explosives(and other similar operations) successfullyprevented
the enemy from detonating these structures while IDF forces were in them,
despite the enormous efforts made by Hamas and other terrorist organizations,
who rigged a substantial number of buildings to explode in the areas
where the IDF operated.

The
investigation shows that in all the areas of operation, the decision to
authorize the demolishing of houses wasonly made by high ranking
officers. In addition, the destruction of buildings was only initiated
after it was determined by the forces that they were vacant. As a result, as
far as the investigation was able to determine, no uninvolved civilians were
harmed during the demolition of infrastructure and buildings by IDF forces.

The
investigation showed that in many cases, the preparations made by Hamas and
other terrorist organizations were responsible for the significant damage
caused to houses. This was due to the secondary explosions caused by the
detonation of explosive devices or weaponry placed by Hamas within the
structures. This was illustrated by an incident which was investigated, in
which a building in one of Gaza's northern neighborhoods was fired upon,
resulting in the unexpected detonation of a chain of explosive devices planted
by Hamas, damaging many other buildings in the neighborhood.

The
investigation showed that the orders and directions given with regard to damage
to property during the operation, at all levels, emphasized that all demolition
operations should be carried out in a manner which would minimize to the
greatest extent possible the damage caused to any property not used by Hamas
and other terror organizations in the fighting. During the investigation it was
apparent that that this issue was not stressed sufficiently in the written
plans for the operation. However, the investigation clearly showed that the
forces in the field understood in which circumstances structures or
infrastructure could be demolished as well as the limitations relating to
demolitions.

The
investigations did not identify any instances of intentional harm done to
civilian infrastructure and with the exception of a single incident (which was immediately
halted by the relevant Brigade Commander, and was dealt with using disciplinary
measures) it didn't find any incidents in which structures or property were
damaged as "punishment" or without an operational justification.
In all of the areas in which the IDF operated, the level of damage to the
infrastructure was proportional, and did not deviate from that
which was required to fulfill the operational requirements.

Overall, the
extent of damage caused to buildings was a direct result of the extensive use
by Hamas of those same buildings for terrorist purposes and targeting IDF
forces.

The IDF
Chief of the General Staff, Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi accepted the recommendation
made by the head of the investigation to create clear regulations and orders
with regard to the issue of demolition of infrastructure and structures as well
as a clear combat doctrine. Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi also accepted the recommendation
that the combat doctrine should include a definition of relevant
"incidents and responses" to be distributed amongst all combat
forces. Lt. Gen. Ashkenazi also accepted the recommendation to create a clear
procedure of documentation and reporting for such operations. The conclusion
that the extent of the demolished infrastructure and building was
proportionate, in light of the operational requirements, was also approved by
the IDF Chief of the General Staff.

THE
OPERATION IN GAZA: FACTUAL AND LEGAL ASPECTS

(b) Destruction of Private Property

436. Some destruction of private property and infrastructure
is an unfortunate but inescapable by-product of every armed conflict. While
recognising this reality, the Law of Armed Conflict requires that the damage be
justified by military necessity. For instance, Article 23(g) of the Hague
Regulations of 1907 states that it is forbidden “to destroy or seize the
enemy’s property unless such destruction or seizure be imperatively
demanded by the necessities of war.”

437. The investigations thus far reveal that although IDF
forces were instructed to operate carefully at all times and to minimise
collateral damage to civilian property to the extent possible, extensive damage
to civilian infrastructure and personal property did occur in the course of the
Gaza Operation. Much of the damage was demanded by the necessities of war and
was the outcome of Hamas’ mode of operating.

438. As explained in Section V.B above, Hamas based its main
line of defence on civilian infrastructure in the Gaza Strip (i.e. buildings,
infrastructure, agricultural lands etc.), and specifically on booby-trapped
structures (mostly residential), the digging of explosive tunnels and tunnels
intended for the moving of fighters and weaponry. This created an above-ground
and underground deployment by Hamas in the Gaza Strip’s urban areas.
During the Gaza Operation, IDF troops were forced not only to fight the
terrorists themselves, but also to deal with the physical infrastructure
prepared in advance by Hamas and other terrorist organisations.

439. As part of this challenge, IDF forces demolished
structures that threatened their troops and had to be removed. These included
(1) houses which were actually used by Hamas operatives for military purposes
in the course of the fighting, (2) other structures used by Hamas operatives
for terrorist activity, (3) structures whose total or partial destruction was
imperatively required for military necessities, such as the movement of forces
from one area to another (given that many of the roads were booby-trapped), (4)
agricultural elements used as cover for terrorist tunnels and infrastructure,
and (5) infrastructure next to the security fence between Gaza and Israel, used
by Hamas for operations against IDF forces or for digging tunnels into Israeli
territory.

440. Despite the enormous efforts made by Hamas and other
terrorist organisations, who rigged a substantial number of buildings to
explode in the areas where IDF forces were present, IDF actions to destroy such
buildings in advance successfully prevented their detonation while IDF forces
were in them

441. In the context of this complex battlefield, Israeli
forces were instructed to operate carefully at all times, and to minimise
collateral damage to the extent possible. For purposes of the Law of Armed
Conflict, the extent of the damage to private property and infrastructure is
not itself indicative of a violation. Rather, as already explained, in each
case it must be considered whether a legitimate military purpose existed and if
the damage to property was proportional to this aim. Furthermore, unanticipated
damage and damage caused by Hamas cannot be blamed on Israeli forces.

442. In light of the multiple allegations raised against the
IDF in connection with the destruction of residential and public buildings
during the conflict, the IDF launched a full investigation into allegations of
excessive damage to civilian objects during the Gaza Operation. The IDF
investigation (which is now being examined by the Military Advocate General) confirmed that although relatively
extensive damage was caused to private property, the IDF’s activities
which caused this damage complied with the Law of Armed Conflict. The Law of
Armed Conflict allows the destruction of private property where, as here, it is
a matter of military necessity. With the exception of a single incident, which
was immediately halted by the relevant Commander and was dealt with using
disciplinary measures, the investigation did not find any incidents in which
structures or property were damaged as “punishment” or without an
operational justification.

443. The investigation showed that in all the areas of
operation, the decision to authorise the demolition of houses was made only by
high ranking officers. In addition, the destruction of buildings was only
initiated after it was determined by the forces that they were vacant in order
to minimise civilian casualties. Accordingly, as far as the investigation was
able to determine, no civilians were harmed during the demolition of
infrastructure and buildings by IDF forces.

444. The investigation showed that, in many cases, the
preparations made by Hamas and other terrorist organisations were responsible
for the significant damage caused to houses. As explained above, unanticipated
damage to some buildings occurred due to the existence of subterranean tunnels
that were unknown to IDF forces. In other cases, the damage was due to the
secondary explosions caused by the detonation of explosive devices or weaponry
placed by Hamas within the structures. This was illustrated by an incident in
which a building in one of Gaza’s northern neighbourhoods was fired upon,
resulting in the unexpected detonation of a chain of explosive devices planted
by Hamas, damaging many other buildings in the neighbourhood.

445. It should be emphasised that IDF orders and directions,
dealing with the destruction of private property and applicable in the Gaza
Operation, stressed that all demolition operations should be carried out in a
manner that would minimise to the greatest extent possible the damage caused to
any property not used by Hamas and other terrorist organisations in the
fighting. Nevertheless, due to the complex dilemmas commanders faced with
regard to decisions on destruction of property in the course of fighting in
Gaza, as a result of Hamas’ mode of operations, one of the lessons
learned was that there should be a set of clear rules in this regard that will
assist commanders in taking such decisions in the future. Accordingly, the
Chief of the General Staff instructed the creation of such clear regulations
and orders, as well as a clear combat doctrine, with regard to demolition of
infrastructure and structures.

6 September 2009

[1]
B’Tselem determined that Israeli attacks killed 330 combatants. It did
not include in its list of civilian casualties 36 fatalities whose status as
combatants or non-combatants it could not determine. B’Tselem also
did not include as civilian casualties 248 policemen killed at police stations
on December 27, 2008, whom the IDF claimed were combatants, but stated, “taking into account the assumption that persons are deemed
civilians unless proven otherwise, B’Tselem is unable to determine that
all the police officers were legitimate targets and that the Palestinian police
in Gaza, as an institution, is part of the combat forces of Hamas.”
(B’Tselem, “B’Tselem Publishes Complete Fatality Figures from
Operation Cast Lead,” September 9, 2009, http://www.btselem.org/English/Press_Releases/20090909.asp,
accessed November 18, 2009.) According to the IDF, 1,166 Palestinians died in
Operation Cast Lead. From these people, 709 were “Hamas terror
operatives,” 295 were non-combatants, and 162 men had an undetermined
status. The IDF did not produce a list of names. (IDF, “Vast
Majority of Palestinians Killed in Operation Cast Lead Found to be Terror
Operatives,” March 26, 2009,
http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/Press+Releases/09/03/2601.htm, accessed
November 18, 2009.)

[2]
This included four Israeli soldiers who were killed by IDF “friendly
fire.” B’Tselem, “B’Tselem Publishes Complete Fatality
Figures from Operation Cast Lead,” September 9, 2009.

[4]
During the war, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian
Affairs (OCHA), 51,000 displaced people sought shelter in UN facilities;
shortly after the war, a preliminary UN assessment conducted in January found
that 71,657 people were displaced and staying with host families. In a survey
the humanitarian organization CARE conducted in January, 56 percent of Gaza
residents contacted said they were hosting displaced people. UN OCHA,
“The Humanitarian Monitor,” February 2009, page 10, http://www.ochaopt.org/documents/ocha_opt_humanitarian_monitor_2009_02_01_english.pdf,
accessed September 1, 2009; OCHA, “UN Flash Appeal for Gaza,” February 2, 2009, http://www.ochaopt.org/gazacrisis/admin/output/files/ocha_opt_gaza_flash_appeal_2009_02_05_english.pdf,
accessed September 2, 2009; CARE phone
interviews with 525 people, conducted in January, cited by OCHA,
“Situation Report on the Humanitarian Situation in the Gaza Strip –
No. 15,” 20-21 January 2009, http://www.unicef.org/malaysia/OCHA_full_report_-_2009.1.21.pdf.

[5]
Human Rights Watch telephone interviews and email correspondence with three
humanitarian agencies and NGOs, March 21 and 22, 2010. The international
humanitarian workers did not want to be identified, either due to internal
policy or for fear that their access to Gaza would be limited as a result of
criticisms.

[13]Britain Palestine All
Parliamentary Group, One year on from war: a report on the humanitarian
and political situation in Gaza, p. 9, March 22, 2010,
http://www.caabu.org/pdf/One%20year%20on%20from%20war.pdf, accessed March 23,
2010.

[14]
“Secretary-General's briefing to the Security Council on the situation in
the Middle East, including the Question of Palestine,” March 24,
2010.

[19]
Palestinian Federation of Industries (PFI) and Konrad Adenaur Stiftung, The Need for a Post-War
Development Strategy in the Gaza Strip: Overview and Analysis of Industrial
Damage and its Grave Consequences, March 2009, p. 13, http://www.pscc.ps/down/Gaza%20Industry%20Reconstruction%20and%20Development%20Report.pdf,
accessed September 4, 2009.

[20]
PFI, The Need for a Post-War Development Strategy in the Gaza Strip,
March 2009, p.8.

[21]Gaza Private Sector: Post-War Status and Needs, February 25, 2009, p. 5.
The percentage was measured in terms of “potential” capacity
because, in the majority of cases, Israel’s blockade on imports of cement
into Gaza had already led most of these factories to stop operating prior to
the war.

[39]
A civilian object previously used as a military objective (because, for
instance, enemy forces sometime earlier deployed there) is not a valid military
target; its destruction would be a form of unlawful punitive destruction.

[43]
Transcript of Breaking the Silence interview with D-9 driver, Jerusalem,
January 27, 2009, on file with Human Rights Watch. Breaking the Silence
published parts of the interview in Operation Cast Lead, July 15, 2009,
available at www.shovrimshtika.org.

[44]
Transcript of Breaking the Silence interview with D-9 driver, Jerusalem,
January 27, 2009, on file with Human Rights Watch.

[53]
For example, see the IDF video, “Weapons in Gaza mosque struck by Israel
air force, January 1, 2009,” posted to YouTube by the user “Idfnadesk,” http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwP_LusgPAw,
accessed October 1, 2009.

[54]
Human Rights Watch is not aware of any cases where Palestinian armed groups
destroyed or damaged homes or other civilian objects in Gaza in the kinds of unlawful
actions that are the subject of this report, whether in deliberate or reckless
attacks that lacked military necessity, or disproportionately or
indiscriminately.

[58]
See discussion below for details about the cases of Majdi Abd Rabbo, Arif
Salman al-Err, and Akram Ayesh Abd Rabbo. Fourth Geneva
Convention, art. 40 (civilians may only be compelled to undertake work under
strict circumstances and “which is not directly related to the conduct of
military operations”).

[59]Secretary-General’s Summary of the Report of the United Nations
Headquarters Board of Inquiry into certain incidents in the Gaza strip between
27 December 2008 and 18 January 2009, “Incident (e): Small arms
fire affecting an UNRWA convoy in the Ezbat Abed Rabou area on 8 January 2009
and related damage to a UN vehicle,” May 5, 2009. The
Secretary-General did not publish the Board’s report, but provided a
summary to the Security Council.

[60]
Ibid.The Board found that as a result of
a failure of communication within the IDF, the IDF subsequently fired small-arms
rounds at the lead car of the convoy “as a warning.”

[61]
Fifty buildings were destroyed or severely damaged from January 10 to 16, and
another 90 buildings from January 16 to 19, during the period when the IDF was
pulling out of Gaza.UNOSAT identified a
similar pattern in the numbers of impact craters, apparently from artillery or
aerial bombs, visible in fields and roads in the neighborhood over the course
of the IDF operation: 11 craters from December 27, 2008 to January 6, 2009; 20
more from January 6 to 10; none from January 10 to 16; and three from January
16 to 19. UN Institute for Training and Research, Operational Satellite
Applications Program (UNOSAT), “Satellite image analysis in support to
the United Nations Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,” April 27,
2009, p. 14, copy on file with Human Rights Watch.

[67]
The Fact Finding Mission noted that Halevi’s article provided useful
information, but “that the one incident described in the submission which
it has investigated itself illustrates the unreliability of some of the sources
the [article] relies on. In this incident, the source claimed that three
Palestinian combatants had laid an ambush in a house in Izbat Abd Rabbo, hurled
explosives at the Israeli armed forces and managed to drag a wounded Israeli
soldier into the house. From the facts it has itself gathered, the Mission can
exclude that in this incident the Palestinian combatants managed to capture an
Israeli soldier. This example suggests that some websites of Palestinian armed
groups might magnify the extent to which Palestinians successfully attacked
Israeli forces in urban areas.” Report of the Fact Finding Mission, para.
456, p. 139.

[68]
The following list provides the names, ages and dates of militants PCHR lists
as killed in Izbt Abd Rabbo, followed by the data provided by B’Tselem
where that data conflicts. B’Tselem does not provide precise
location information, but states that three of the fatalities on PCHR’s
list were killed in Jabalya refugee camp, an area that is inconsistent with
Izbt Abd Rabbo, and that another was killed on an earlier date. Muhammad
Nahed Ali Abed Rabbu, 22, January 3; Hassan Hesham al-Sakka, 21, January 14
[BTselem: killed in Jabalya refugee camp]; Abdullah Malek Addin al-Hajj Ali,
22, January 17 [B’Tselem: killed on January 12]; Fayez Ahmed
Muhammad Abu Warda, 30, January 18 [B’Tselem: wounded on January 12
in Jabalya refugee camp, died January 18]; Eyad Khamis Abed al- Banna, 21,
January 18 [B’Tselem: wounded on January 12 in Jabalya refugee camp, died
January 18]; Ibrahim Ahmed Abdullah ‘Elwan, 32, January 18; and
Ibrahim Saber Rabi' Jneid, 21, January 18.

[83]
According to the Report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,
Su’ad’s son, Khaled Abd Rabbo, “drew the Mission’s
attention to what appeared to be an anti-tank mine visible under the rubble of
his neighbour’s house, which had reportedly been used by the Israeli
armed forces to cause the controlled explosion which brought down the building.
[…]the way the buildings had collapsed strongly suggests that both Khaled
Abd Rabbo’s house and that of his neighbour were deliberately demolished
by explosives experts, rather than damaged during combat.” Report of the
UN Fact Finding Mission, para. 993, p. 271.

[87]
Hamas de-miners removed unexploded ordnance (UXO) as well as, in some cases,
the shrapnel and remains from exploded artillery munitions and anti-tank mines,
from sites across Gaza after the war. UXO experts in Gaza and news
reports speculated that, in addition to reducing the threat that civilians
would be harmed by UXO, Hamas was collecting explosive material for its own
military purposes. Human Rights Watch interview with UXO expert (name and
affiliation withheld), Gaza City, April 17, 2009.

[97]
Human Rights Watch interview with a doctor, name withheld, Shajaiya, April 11,
2009. The doctor’s home was damaged before the war on March 4 by a
locally-made rocket fired by militants that fell short of its intended target
in Israel. See Human Rights Watch, Rockets from Gaza: Harm to
Civilians from Palestinian Armed Groups’ Rocket Attacks, August 2009,
p. 19.

[98]
The family has reportedly owned the factories for 55 years and employed up to
170 people. Tim McGirk, “The Devastation of Gaza: From Factories to Ice
Cream,” Time, January 28, 2009,
http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1874539,00.html, accessed
September 4, 2009; Report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza
Conflict, September 15, 2009, para. 1015, p. 278.

[100]
Human Rights Watch telephone interview with al-Wadiyya, Gaza City, April 11,
2009. Al-Wadiyya could not immediately provide figures for the losses suffered
at each plant, and Human Rights Watch could not independently verify the value
of the damage.

[103]
According to an anonymous Israeli soldier, his company was surprised when it
received orders to pull out of Gaza at midnight on January 17; they began to
leave at 2 a.m. on January 18. Breaking the Silence, Operation Cast
Lead, Testimony #52, p. 106. See also Israel Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, The Operation in Gaza, paragraph 86.

[104]
The other weapons included the remains of five Israel-manufactured
fuel-explosive bombs, fired from the ground at a low trajectory and used to
clear a path of potential landmines.

[112]
According to UN OCHA, the extended Abu Eida family comprises 83 people who,
prior to December 27, 2008 lived in a total of 11 houses in the industrial zone
east of Gaza City; ten of these houses were destroyed during the offensive. The
UN reported that in addition to the two concrete factories, the family owned a
citrus fruit packing factory, 28 commercial and private vehicles, two farms,
and numerous fruit trees and livestock. According to the UN, “all the
livestock had been killed; the citrus, date and olive trees had been uprooted;
and the citrus packing factory was severely damaged.” OCHA, Locked In:
The Humanitarian Impact of Two Years of Blockade on the Gaza Strip, August
20, 2009, p. 8.

[115]
At the time the factory was built, Abu Eida explained, Israel had the authority
to grant certification stating that the factory met the standards set out by
the International Standards Organization (ISO). Human Rights Watch
interview with Jamal Abu Eida, Izbt Abd Rabbo, April 12, 2009.

[117]
Human Rights Watch interview with Rashid al-Dalon, Tuffah, April 12, 2009. One
of the silos had been re-erected when Human Rights Watch visited in
April.

[118]
According to the report of the UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict,
“the Israeli armed forces began striking the plant from the air, damaging
it significantly. Later ground forces -- equipped with bulldozers and tanks --
moved in and used mines and explosives to destroy the silo that used to contain
4,000 tons of cement. Helicopters launched rockets to destroy the main
manufacturing line and fired holes into the cement containers. Bulldozers were
used to destroy the factory walls. Over four days the factory was
systematically destroyed.” Report of the UN Fact Finding Mission, para.
1008, p. 277.

[128]
In April, Human Rights Watch saw black-clad figures, apparently affiliated with
the al-Qassam Brigades of Hamas, training with rifles to the west of Zeytoun,
in an open agricultural area on the road toward Tel el-Hawa.

[129]
See, e.g., Rory McCarthy, “Amid dust and death, a family’s story
speaks for the terror of war,” The Guardian, January 20, 2009
(quoting Salah al-Samuni); and B’Tselem, “Israeli soldiers kill
‘Atiyyah al-Samuni at home, before his family, Gaza City, Jan.
'09,” testimony of Fahed al-Samuni, 19, given by telephone on January 13,
2009, http://www.btselem.org/english/Testimonies/20090104_Soldiers_kill_Atiyyah_a_Samuni_witness_Fahed_a_Samuni.asp,
accessed June 30, 2009.

[133]TheGuardian reported that “all the witnesses are adamant
that those gathered in Wa'el al-Samuni's house were all civilians and all from
the same extended family.” Rory McCarthy, “Amid dust and death, a
family’s story speaks for the terror of war,” The Guardian,
January 20, 2009.

[134]
For example, Israeli troops reportedly arrived at the home of Musa al-Samuni,
19, at 7:30 a.m. on January 4 under the cover of heavy fire. Don Macintyre,
“Gazans return to mourn their dead and salvage their lives,” The
Independent, January 20, 2009,
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/gazans-return-to-mourn-their-dead-and-salvage-their-lives-1451409.html,
accessed June 12, 2009. Similarly, Maysa al-Samuni, 19, told B’Tselem
that at 9 a.m. Israeli soldiers “with faces painted black and automatic
weapons” ordered her and 13 members of her family to go from the house of
Rashed as-Samuni, her father-in-law, to the house of her father-in-law’s
brother, Talal Halmi al-Samuni, 50. At 11 a.m., “the soldiers came back
and ordered us to go with them” again to the warehouse of Wael al-Samuni,
40. B’Tselem, “Testimony: Soldiers Killed and
injured dozens of persons from a-Samuni family in a-Zeitun neighborhood, Gaza,
Jan. '09,” given by Maysaa as-Samuni to Iyad Haddad by telephone
on January 7, 2009,
http://www.btselem.org/english/Testimonies/20090108_Soldiers_kill_and_wound_members_of_a_Samuni_family.asp,
accessed June 25, 2009.

[142]
Four Palestinian Red Crescent Society ambulances escorted by an ICRC vehicle
evacuated the civilians, many of them children. The medical teams also found 15
corpses but were able to evacuate only two of them. ICRC, “Gaza: ICRC
demands urgent access to wounded as Israeli army fails to assist wounded
Palestinians,” January 8, 2009, http://www.icrc.org/web/eng/siteeng0.nsf/html/palestine-news-080109,
accessed June 10, 2009.

[143]
IDF practice during the war was “to control the area and deepen our hold
of it” before pushing forward, according to the account of a reserve
soldier under the command of an Armored Corps Brigade, which replaced the
Givati Infantry Brigade in the Zeytoun area. Breaking the Silence, Operation
Cast Lead, July15, 2009,p. 7.

[144]
Survivors pulled 22 decomposing bodies from the rubble on that day and on
January 19. Amnesty International, “Operation ‘Cast
Lead’: 22 days of death and destruction,” July 2009, p. 45.

[145]
From west to east along the northern side of Samuni Street, residents told
Human Rights Watch that damaged or destroyed houses belonged to the following
members of the family: 1) Rashad al-Samuni, 42, who was killed along with his
wife Rabab and their two sons Taqfiq and Walid, when their house was partly
destroyed and their chicken farm was demolished. 2) ‘Atiyya
al-Samuni, in his late 30s, who was killed, and whose 4 year old son Ahmad was
wounded and later died; the single-story concrete house they inhabited with
‘Atiyya’s wife Zeinat and their seven other children was destroyed.
The third building 3) was a three-story residence, struck by white phosphorus
shell on the third floor and severely damaged by tank fire on other floors: a)
on the first floor lived Talal al-Samuni, 51, who was killed, one unmarried son
and two daughters, and one married son and his wife; b) on the second floor
facing the street lived Iyad Talal al-Samuni, 28, his wife Safa who was killed,
and their three children, and c) in the north-facing apartment, Salah
al-Samuni, 30, his wife, and their six children, of whom a girl, Azza, was
killed; d) on the third floor facing east, Helmi al-Samuni, and his wife Maha
and six month old son, who were both killed, and e) facing west, his brother
Ahmed, 25, with his wife. 4) behind this building, to the north, was the
destroyed two-story home of Ibrahim al-Samuni, 45, his wife, and eight
children, who lived on the first floor; on the second floor Ibrahim’s son
Muhammad, who was killed along with one of his three children, and
Muhammad’s wife. 5) the next house facing the street, which was
destroyed, belonged to Nafez al-Samuni, 45, his wife, and eight children, one
of whom, Ahmed, 12, was wounded and is now in Belgium. 6) Saleh
al-Samuni’s home was demolished, where he lived with his wife, Ghaliya
Hamdi, 44, and his five sons and daughters. 7) behind it to the north, Israeli
forces destroyed the home occupied by Na’il al-Samuni, his wife Hanan,
32, who was killed, their daughters Huda, 17, who was killed, Hitam and
Shireen, and their sons Mahmoud, Muhammad and Ahmad. The last two homes on the
street belonged to 8) Ziyad al-Samuni, 32, his wife and six children, and 9)
Jihad al-Samuni, 36, his wife and six children; both were destroyed.
Behind them to the north are the homes of Hamid Ali al-Samuni, 47, Tariq
al-Samuni, and Abu Tariq al-Samuni, all of which are still standing; but
further behind them, two homes were destroyed that belonged to 10) Imad Izzat
al-Samuni, 37, and his wife and 10 children, and 11) his brother Iyad, 32, who
was killed, and his wife and six children. From west to east along the southern
side of the street, a mosque was destroyed opposite the home of ‘Atiyya
al-Samuni. Next to it was 12) the destroyed home of Fares al-Samuni, his wife
Rizka who was killed, their unmarried daughter and son, and their married son
with his wife and child. 13) Behind Fares’ home to the south, the
chicken farm of Maher and Majid al-Samuni was destroyed. 14) Next to
Fares’ home was Wa’el al-Samuni’s home, who lived there with
his wife Ibtissam, four sons and seven daughters; two of the children were
killed. 15) Next, set back from the street, was the destroyed home of Rafiq
al-Samuni, his wife Samaker, their two sons and three daughters. 16)
Further south and east was the corrugated metal house of Arafat al-Samuni, his
two wives, his son, and his mother, which was bulldozed. 17) Finally,
near Salahaddin Street, Nidal al-Samuni’s home was destroyed, where he
lived with his wife, two sons and daughter; Nidal was killed.

[146]
Don Macintyre, “Gazans return to mourn their dead and salvage their
lives,” The Independent, January 20, 2009.

[148]Silmi’s house was
located at 31°28'40.58"N/ 34°26'2.56"E. Another
Abdallah Muhammad Silmi lived in a home on the north side of Road 10; Human
Rights Watch visually confirmed witness statements that the home was
demolished, but did not interview the second Abdallah Silmi.

[158]
Human Rights Watch interview with Madhat Abu Ghranima, Zeytoun, April 17, 2009.
The Abu Ghranima family lived in a compound located at 31°28'43.81"N/
34°25'57.22"E. Human Rights Watch observed that the family property
had a line of sight to the home of Abd Jumaa Ayad.

[160]
From west to east along the south side of al-Samuni Road, Israeli forces
destroyed the homes of Madhat Ayad, his wife and five children; Osama Ayad, his
wife and six children; Ra’id Ayad, 28, who lived in a corrugated metal
house with his wife and five children; and Jawad Ayad, 35, his wife and six
children. To the south of these houses, a large concrete home owned by
Siham Magid Ayad, which was unoccupied before the war, is still standing; IDF
troops used it as a command center for the area, residents said. To the
south, Israeli forces destroyed homes belonging to Bassam Rezik Ayad, 31, and
his wife; Abd al-Karim Razzaq Ayad, 23, and his wife; Muhammad Lulu, 40, and his
wife Afaf Lulu; and Iyad Farraj Ashur, 30, who lived alone. Three more
houses were destroyed in open areas to the south west: those of Salima Ayad,
75, his wife and their daughter; Abd Jumaa Ayad, 85, and his wife, Madhiya
Salima Ayad, 80, both of whom were killed in the area during the war; and
Muhammad Sahiur, 30, his wife, three daughters and one son.

[175]
Israeli officials announced that the ground invasion of Gaza began at 2 a.m. on
January 3, 2009. However, resident Mahmoud al-Ajrami said that on
December 29, 2008 he observed tanks in an elevated area roughly 200 meters
north of his home. Human Rights Watch interview with Mahmoud al-Ajrami, western
Beit Lahiya, April 9, 2009. This interview was conducted in English,
without an interpreter.

[182]
For example, one round was
marked, “40 mm, HEDP
M43041.” The UN Fact Finding Mission on the Gaza Conflict later
identified the rounds as 40 mm “grenade machine gun” shells, and
determined that they were fired from the Badr flour mill building during its
occupation by Israeli forces. The attack on the Badr flour mill is
discussed at length in the Report of the UN Fact Finding Mission, Chapter XIII
a., pp. 253-260.

[190]
Human Rights Watch interview with Hashem al-Asali, western Beit Lahiya, April
9, 2009. According to B’Tselem, Suhail Ahmad Rashad al-Asali, 24, was a combatant killed
in the Beit Lahiya area on January 14. Human Rights Watch could not confirm
Suhail al-Asali’s date of death.

[191]
The Juma’a family’s
block is located at 31°33'9.00"N/ 34°28'15.77"E.

[192]
The destroyed homes along al-Amudi
street, from south to north, are as follows: 1) The house on the south-west
corner of the block had three floors. The first floor was occupied by Muhammad
Juma’a, who lived with his wife and two children. The second floor was
occupied by Osama Juma’a, a member of the Qassam Brigades who was killed
by a drone attack elsewhere. The third floor had two households, one
headed by Hani Juma’a with his wife and four children, the second headed
by Nasser Juma’a, his wife and four children. 2) Moving north along
al-Amudi street, the second house had two floors. The first floor was occupied
by El Abid Juma’a,
his wife and three children. The second floor was occupied by Muhammad al
Abid Ahmad Juma’a, his wife and two children. 3) The third house had two
floors, the first occupied by Hassan Ahmad Juma’a, his wife and two
children, the second by Hassan’s son Abdel Basset Hassan Juma’a,
his wife and five children. 4) The first floor of the fourth house was
occupied by Ibrahim Ahmad Juma’a, his wife and three children; the second
floor of the fourth house was occupied by Ahmad Juma’a, who was killed by
a drone strike elsewhere, and his parents. 5) The fifth house, which lies
on the northwest corner of the block, was occupied by Siham Ibrahim Juma’a and her four children.
An alleyway forms the northern border of the block; moving east along the alley
from Siham Juma’a’s house, a sixth, two-story house, belonging to
Majid Ibrahim Juma’a, was seriously damaged. Some of its nine
residents continued to occupy part of the first floor when Human Rights Watch
visited it in April. The next house to the east was inhabited by Muhammad
Ibrahim Juma’a, his wife and six children; it was believed to have been
bulldozed. The eighth destroyed house belonged to Ala’a Juma’a, an unemployed worker, who had
lived there with his wife and four children. The last house, in the
northeast corner of the block, was seriously damaged and still inhabited by
Imad al-Abid Juma’a and his family. Human Rights Watch interviews
with four former residents, Juma’a block, Salatin, Gaza, April 9 and 13, 2009.

[195]
Ajrami complained that in addition to badly damaging the structure, the IDF had
destroyed four flat-screen television sets, two refrigerators, and five
settees. He says that he believes IDF soldiers stole two laptop
computers, 10 or 12 bottles of eau de cologne, a video camera, two mobile
phones, and $25,000 in money and gold.

[200]
Ahmad Ibrahim Jumaa, born December 27, 1984, is listed as a
“martyr” on the Al-Qassam Brigades website, which states he was
killed on January 10, 2009, by an Israeli rocket or missile. See http://www.alqassam.ps/arabic/sohdaa5.php?id=1333,
accessed June 23, 2009.

[203]
The Palestinian Center for Human Rights issued a short report about the BMW
spare parts store: http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/campaigns/english/aftermath/6.html,
accessed June 30, 2009.

[204]
Human Rights Watch interview with Ra’id abd el-Rahman, western Beit Lahiya,
April 13, 2009. Human Rights Watch also identified the yellow-painted shell
casing of an IDF 155 mm illumination
artillery round that abd el-Rahman found in his home after the war.

[205]
The building comprised four apartments housing 21 people, including Osama, his
wife and five children, his mother, and his three brothers and their
families. Human Rights Watch interview with Osama and Fawziya as-Sultan,
western Beit Lahiya, April 13, 2009.

[219]
B’Tselem lists the following names, ages and dates of death of alleged
combatants killed in Khuza’a: Nur Muhammad Nur a-Din ‘Amesh, 24,
January 11; Nidal Muhammad
Hassan Abu Reidah, 18, January 13; Suliman Jum’ah ‘Amesh, 19,
January 13; ‘Alaa Ahmad Abu Reidah, 21, January 13; Ahmad Jum’ah
Ahmad Abu Jamus, 27, January 13. PCHR also reported that Nour ‘Amesh was killed in
Khuza’a on January 11. Local residents said he was killed by a
drone-fired missile. See Human Rights Watch, Rain of Fire:
Israel’s Unlawful Use of White Phosphorus in Gaza, page 53.

[220]
On January 10, an IDF spokesperson, Capt. Guy Spiegelman, denied that the IDF had
conducted operations “in the area of Khuzaa” on that day.
Adel Zaanoun, “Three Palestinians killed, dozens hurt in Gaza,”
Agence France-Presse, January 10, 2009.

[221]
Hanan al-Najjar, 47, died on January 10, when a spent 155mm artillery shell
containing white phosphorus crashed through the roof of her house, killing her
and wounding her four children. See Human Rights Watch, Rain of Fire.

[223]
Israeli forces shot at an ambulance that came to retrieve her body, forcing it
to turn around, and shot and killed Mahmoud al-Najjar, a relative of Rawhiya
al-Najjar’s, when he returned to the area to try to retrieve her body.
Ibid., p. 19.

[225]
These included homes lying close to the border to the east, that residents said
belonged to Khalid abd el-Aziz al-Najjar, Majid Fathi al-Najjar, and Ramsi
al-Najjar. These homes were allegedly all demolished.

[226]
From west to east, parallel to Azata
street, the following buildings were all partially or completely destroyed:
1) Ayman Muhammad
al-Najjar, 38, lived with his wife and five children in a home that was partly
demolished. 2) Shawqi Hamdan, 44, lived with his wife and eight children in a
destroyed one-story home. 3) Muhammad M’Selim al-Najjar, in his late 20s, lived in a
home with his wife and three children that is still habitable but was damaged
at the back. 4) Shawgi M’Sellam, 41, lived in a
two-story home, now destroyed, with his wife and seven children. 5) Osama
al-Najjar, 39, his wife and six children lived in a two-story home that was
destroyed. 6) Tawfiq Sulaiman, 58, owned but did not live in a building, now
destroyed, where Mahmoud Ibrahim al-Najjar, 25, recently married, and his wife
inhabited the second floor. 7) Beside Tawfiq lived Hazim al-Najjar, around 40 years old, his wife and two
daughters; their home was destroyed. 8) In another, single-story house close
by, now destroyed, Ibrahim Abd al-Aziz al-Najjar, 58, his wife and seven
children. 9) East of Ibrahim al-Najjar’s house was a multi-story building
inhabited by several families before the IDF leveled it. The ground floor was
inhabited by Khaled al-Najjar, 45, his wife and eight children; on the second
floor, Yusuf Muhammad al-Najjar, in his 50s, his wife Su’ad, and their
three sons and two daughters occupied two apartments; Yusuf al-Najjar’s
son Fadi, in his mid 20s, lived on the third floor with his wife and two
children. 10) Just south of Yousuf was a one story home owned by Ashraf Marzuq
al-Najjar, 35, his wife and six children. 11) East of these homes was Fuad Marzoug al-Najjar’s
home, also destroyed; it is not known how many people lived there. 12) Beside
Fuad lived Fathi al-Najjar, 40, his wife and seven children. 13) Next to Fathi,
Tariq Ibrahim Marzuq al-Najjar, 38, lived with his wife and six children in one
apartment of a single-story building he shared with Muhammad al-Najjar and his
wife and three children. 14) Ismail Marzuq al-Najjar’s home, next to
Tariq’s home, was destroyed; Human Rights Watch does not know how many
people lived there. 15) Closer to the street, Nabil Ibrahim Muhammad
al-Najjar, 41, lived with his wife and five children, aged six months to nine
years, in a concrete home. 16) Ibrahim Ismail al-Najjar, 40, and his wife and
six children lived on the ground floor of a multi-story building. Yasir
Ismail al-Najjar, 35, his wife and six children lived on the second floor; and
Wa’el Ismail, 23, his wife and two children lived on the third floor.

[229]In
most cases Human Rights Watch investigated, Israeli forces destroyed property
with bulldozers or anti-tank mines. However, in one other case, roughly
100 meters from Thabit’s home, which was damaged by what he said was a
tank shell, Israeli aerial attacks destroyed an ornate, five-story home
belonging to Ismail Abd el-Atif Jarghon.
Human Rights Watch observed a hole in the roof of the collapsed structure, and
through it, could see a larger hole in the floor of the top story, indicating
that an aerial bomb may have been dropped with a delayed fuse in order to detonate inside the
house. Human Rights Watch was unable to determine the date of the
attacks, which residents said occurred prior to the ground invasion. Hamada Jarghon, 40, said he
worked at the building on behalf of his uncle, its owner, who lives in the
United Arab Emirates and had not yet occupied the building. “He
started to build it in 2005. The construction cost $750,000.”
According to Hamada, his uncle owned two homes, this one and another in Khan
Yunus city. “The [Israeli] Shabak [Shin Bet] called my uncle’s
house in the city and told us to evacuate, but we didn’t know which
one. So we evacuated that one. Then they hit this one.” Human
Rights Watch had insufficient information on which to determine whether the
attack was lawful or not, such as whether the destroyed building had suffered
from secondary explosions caused by the presence of weapons stored by
militants.

[230]
Moving east from the intersection, the homes belonged to: 1) the Abu Akil
family (four people); 2) the al-Amor family (the number of residents is
not known); 3) Jihad Muhammad Slaam Abu Ataya, 30, and his wife and child; 4)
Imad Salam Abu Attaya, his wife and two children; 5) Muhammad Suleiman Abu
Attaya, his wife and four children; 6) Nahed Abu Attaya, his wife and four
children; 7) Fayok Attaya,
26, and his wife; 8) Salama attaya and his wife and 28 year-old son, with
2-year-old grandson; 9) Meliha Attaya, 65, a widow, with two unmarried sons, 24
and 33, and four unmarried daughters; 10) a home that was not inhabited, owned
by two unmarried brothers, Nazif and Badr Attaya; and 12) the home of Talal Abu Attaya, his wife and
their eight children.

[235]
Nahed Attaya’s home was located at 31°16'55.38"N / 34°18'44.40"E.

[236]
From the corner of the block, houses belonging to the following people were
destroyed: 1) Rami Adel Musa al-Amor, 19, owned a one story home that had just
taken delivery of furniture for his upcoming wedding; 2) Adel Musa Amira al-Amor, 42, his wife,
son and two girls; 3) Soni Ahmad
Atiya, 25, and his wife; 4) Salim Jumaa Ataya, 40, his wife and three children;
5) Tamam Ataya, a 70 year old widow, and her adult daughter. To the east
of Tamam’s house, other destroyed homes in the compound belonged to: 6)
Aisha Jumaa Ataya, a 30 or 35 year old widow; 7) Rasmiya Hmad Ataya, 48, a widow, and her eight children;
8) Iman Atiya Ataya, 30, a
widow and her two children; 9) Faour
Ahmad Ataya, 60, his wife, and nine children; and 10) a two story building
with Aliya Atayya, 25, and
her four children on one floor, and Talal Atayya, his wife and five children on the
other. Moving from the corner of the compound where Rami Adel
al-Amor’s home was, along the road to the east, other destroyed homes
were inhabited by: 11) Ghada
Muhammad Amor, a widow, and her child; 12) a large building owned by
Muhammad Musa al Amor, 52. Families there included a) Ahmad Atayya, his four
sisters, two brothers, and mother; b) Ahmad’s brother Imad, 26, his wife
and two children; and c) Majid Muhammad, 24, and his wife.

[242]
According to Sulaiman Muhammad
Atwa al-Amor, 35, the driver of a cement mixer at the Abu Taha cement factory, Ashraf Muhammad al-Amor, 30,
and Ahmad Atwa al-Amor,
buildings belonging to the following members of the family were destroyed: 1)
Sulaiman al-Amor’s two story home, where he lived with his wife and five
children. 2) Yasir al-Amor, his wife and five children. 3)
Sulaiman’s mother, Hijer
Sulaiman al-Amor, 60, and her younger daughter. 4) A two-story building
where Ashraf Muhammad al-Amor, 30,his wife and four children lived on
the first floor, and his second wife and two children lived on the second
floor. 5) Atwa Ahmad al-Amor, 30, his wife and three children. 6) Anwar
Ahmad al-Amor, 33, his wife and four children. 7) Abdallah Abd al-Majid
al-Amor, 33, in a corrugated-metal construction home with his wife and six
children. 8) Ahmad Atwa al-Amor, 50, his wife, and three other relatives. 9)
Abd al-Majid Atwa al Amor, 40, his wife and eight children. 10) Hani Muhammad
al-Amor, his wife and six children.

[244]
The Abu Sita factory is located at 31°16'57.54"N / 34°18'54.48"E.

[245]
The first building housed four families: Iyad as-Seidi, his wife and two daughters; Ibrahim
as-Seidi, his wife and child; Ibrahim as-Seidi, his wife and children; and
Hamouda as-Seidi, his wife and daughter. Seid Aqil Safi and his four married sons, Hatim, Omar, Ahmad and Ayman Said Safi, lived in the second home.

[247]Hague Convention IV - Laws and
Customs of War on Land: 18 October 1907 (Hague Regulations), 36 Stat. 2277, 1 Bevans 631, 205
Consol. T.S. 277, 3 Martens Nouveau Recueil (ser. 3) 461, entered into
force Jan. 26, 1910; Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions of 12 August
1949, and relating to the Protection of Victims of International Armed
Conflicts (Protocol I) of 8 June 1977, 1125 U.N.T.S. 3, entered into force
December 7, 1978. The “means” of combat generally refer to the
weapons used, while “methods” refer to the manner in which such
weapons are used.

[248]Israel is not party to Protocol I. Under article 96 of Protocol
I, non-state actors may commit, under certain specific circumstances, to apply
the Geneva Conventions and the protocols if they declare their willingness to
do so to the Swiss government. Neither Hamas nor the Palestinian Authority has
ever made a declaration under article 96.

[249]See, e.g., Yoram Dinstein, The Conduct of Hostilities under
the Law of International Armed Conflict (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), p. 11 ( “Much of the Protocol may be regarded as
declaratory of customary international law, or at least as
non-controversial.”). See generally International Committee of the Red
Cross (ICRC), Customary International Humanitarian Law (Cambridge:
Cambridge Univ. Press, 2005).

[250]
See the four Geneva Conventions of 1949, all of which entered into force on Oct. 21, 1950.

[251]Protocol I, art. 48. According to ICRC, Commentary on
the Additional Protocols, “The basic rule of protection and
distinction is confirmed in this article. It is the foundation on which the
codification of the laws and customs of war rests.” Ibid., p. 598.

[255]
Under the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC Statute), it is
a war crime to intentionally direct attacks against civilian objects, except
during the time they are military objectives. ICC Statute, art.
8(2)(b)(ii).

[265]
Fourth Geneva Convention, art. 53. The article 53 phrase
“absolutely necessary by military operations” should “not be
viewed as either narrower or wider” than the language of Hague
Regulations, art. 23(h). Yoram Dinstein, The International Law of
Belligerent Occupation (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2009), p.
196.

[266]
United States, General Orders No. 100 (Lieber Code), April 24, 1863, arts.
15-16 (“Military necessity does not admit … the wanton devastation
of a district. … [I]n general, military necessity does not include any
act of hostility which makes the return to peace unnecessarily
difficult.”) See also ibid., art. 22 (“The principle has been
more and more acknowledged that the unarmed citizen is to be spared in person,
property, and honor as much as the exigencies of war will admit”); art.
38 (“Private property, unless forfeited by crimes or by offenses
of the owner, can be seized only by way of military necessity”).

[267]
Lieber Code, art. 14. The ICRC in its Commentary defines military
necessity as “the necessity for measures which are essential to attain
the goals of war, and which are lawful in accordance with the laws and customs
of war.” ICRC, Commentary on the Additional Protocols, p.
393. The “four foundations” of military necessity, according
to the ICRC, include “urgency, measures which are limited to the
indispensable, the control (in space and time) of the force used, and the means
which should not infringe on an unconditional prohibition.” Ibid.,
paragraph 1396.

[268]
See, e.g., US
Army Field Manual 27-10: The Law of Land Warfare, p. 4.

[278]Bothe, Partsch and Solf, New Rules for Victims of Armed
Conflicts, p. 326; see also Dinstein, The Conduct of Hostilities
under the Law of International Armed Conflict, pp 87-92; and Michael N. Schmitt, Washington
University Global Studies Law Review, “Effects-Based Operations and
The Law Of Aerial Warfare,” vol. 5, no. 2, 2006, p. 278.

[282]Marco Sassoli and Lindsey
Cameron, “The Protection of Civilian Objects – Current State of the
Law and de lege ferenda,” in Natalino Ronzitti and Gabriella
Venturini (eds), The Law of Air Warfare: Contemporary Issues (Utrecht:
Eleven Int., 2006), p. 48.

[283]
Hague Regulations, art. 23(h), on destruction of civilian property is
“generally conceded to be applicable to occupied territories.” Yoram Dinstein, The
International Law of Belligerent Occupation, p. 196.

[286]
Human Rights Watch, Razing Rafah: Mass House Demolitions in the Gaza Strip,
October 2004, http://www.hrw.org/en/reports/2004/10/17/razing-rafah; see also Dinstein, The International Law
of Belligerent Occupation, p. 196 (“When hostilities are
conducted in an occupied territory, they are no different from hostilities
elsewhere”).

[297]See ICRC, Customary International Humanitarian Law, p.
551, citing the draft Articles on State Responsibility, art. 33.
Israel's Civil Wrongs Law (Liability of the State) 5712 - 1952 bars claims
against Israel for harm caused by the IDF during “war operations”
(article 5), which it defines as “any action combating terror, hostile
acts, or insurrection, and also an action intended to prevent terror, hostile acts,
or insurrection that is taken in a situation endangering life or limb”
(article 1). An official English translation of the law as revised in 2005 is
available at http://www.adalah.org/features/compensation/lawe.pdf,
accessed March 24, 2010. To receive compensation, aggrieved Palestinians must
file a complaint with the ministry, which decides whether a settlement
committee will review the case (see article 5a, and Palestinian Centre for Human
Rights, "Genuinely Unwilling," February 2010,
http://www.pchrgaza.org/files/2010/israeli-inve.-%20english.pdf, accessed March
1, 2010). In 2005, the Israeli parliament passed amendments to the Torts Law
that would have prevented, inter alia, citizens of an enemy territory from
being able to sue Israel for damages committed during or outside of conflict,
even if wrongfully committed. On December 12, 2006, Israel’s High
Court struck down this part of the amendments. See H.C. 8276/05, Adalah, et.
al. v. The Minister of Defense, et. al. Adalah,
“Newsletter,” December 12, 2006,
http://www.adalah.org/newsletter/eng/dec06/1.php, accessed September 10, 2009.

[298]
According to Dinstein, writing in 2009, the proposition that the Israeli
occupation of the Gaza Strip is over “is not the prevalent opinion, and
the present writer cannot possibly accept it.” See Dinstein, The
Conduct of Hostilities under the Law of Belligerent Occupation, pp. 276-280.

[299]
Fourth Geneva Convention, art. 33. The prohibition on collective punishment,
which is also considered reflective of customary law, does not only apply to
criminal sanctions but also to “sanctions and harassment of any sort,
administrative, by police action, or otherwise.” Commentary on the
Additional Protocols, para. 3055, cited in ICRC, Customary International Humanitarian Law, rule
103.